


The Life of Domiclese

by RockSunner



Series: Lebam AU [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Greek Mythology - Freeform, Mind Control, Multi, Olympians, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Time Travel, Titans, Unified theory, Zeus - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 06:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 31
Words: 57,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1734098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RockSunner/pseuds/RockSunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Domiclese, a young shepherd in the time of the ancient Greeks. What does he have to do with modern-day Gravity Falls? Quite a lot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Wrath of Diana

Domiclese the shepherd lived in the ancient Greek region of Arcadia with his twin sister Callisto. Although they were rumored to be the children of King Lycaon, they lived simple lives in a small home near the royal city of Lycosura. Every day, while he tended the sheep in their pasture, his sister took their wool and spun it into thread, then dyed the thread and wove it into garments with colorful designs and patterns, which they sold.

He was a serious young man, constantly alert for dangers to his sheep. Callisto was full of joy and seemed to be always smiling. Her name meant "Most Beautiful," and she truly was, in spite of the slight crookedness of her teeth.

"Bye, brother," she told him one evening. "I'm off to my meeting with the Nymphs of Diana."

The Nymphs were a group of young women who worshiped the goddess Diana and took a vow of perpetual virginity (at least as far as men were concerned).

"Have fun," said Domiclese.

"I always do," said Callisto.

In those days there was no written history, only legends passed down by the poets. One such poet was Homerus, a friend of Domiclese and Callisto.

That evening, Homerus came and said, "Domiclese, you must take care for your sister. I have heard that Zeus is here on the prowl, and she is the most beautiful maiden in this area."

"Zeus has come here? Why do the gods not leave us in peace?" asked Domiclese.

"The gods are made of metal in their true form, but they come among us in human bodies, full of lusts like any mortal man," said Homerus.

"Where did the gods come from?" asked Domiclese.

"No-one knows for certain," said Homerus. "Some say that they came from another world, and that they opened a portal to find this Earth."

"In any case, Callisto is safe," said Domiclese. "She has vowed never to be with a man."

"Zeus will care nothing for her vows, and he is tricky," said Homerus. "He sometimes takes on other bodies to seduce women, such as the form of a swan."

"I don't think my sister would go for a swan," said Domiclese.

But that night Callisto returned home late, flushed and hugging herself with joy.

"I have been honored by the goddess Diana herself," said Callisto.

"What do you mean?" asked Domiclese.

"It's a bit personal, but I can tell you," said Callisto. "Tonight she took me as a lover."

"Wait, wait," said Domiclese. "She's a woman, right? She didn't have the... equipment... of a man?"

"That was the funny thing," said Callisto. "She actually did."

"I think you've been had," said Domiclese.

"I have," said Callisto, grinning.

"Not in a good way," said Domiclese.

Soon it became clear that Callisto was pregnant. She was kicked out of the Nymphs of Diana by her former friends, who didn't believe her about the goddess.

On the day that she gave birth to her son, a beautiful woman came to visit with a troupe of servants and a pet bear in tow. Callisto was holding her newborn and lying in bed.

"Great Diana, I'm so glad to see you again," said Callisto. "Meet your son, Arkas."

"This is no son of mine. You sully my name with your lies," said Diana.

"No!" said Domiclese, realizing something terrible was about to happen. He started forward, but two of the servants grabbed him and held him back.

"But... that night... we..." said Callisto.

"You must be punished for your impudence and your disgrace to the vows of the Nymphs," said Diana.

Diana waved her hand, and her servants unrolled a piece of carpet beside the bed. They led the bear unto the carpet and it shuffled its feet, apparently something it was trained to do. Its fur stood up with static electricity.

Domiclese struggled, enraged that he was powerless defend his sister if the bear attacked her, but it simply touched her with its nose.

There was a snap of static, and the bear sat back, stunned.

"Why am I out of bed?" said the bear, with the voice of Callisto. "Who is that with my baby?"

The body of Callisto in bed gave an animal groan, dropped the baby on the bed, and raced out of the house on all fours.

Callisto tried to reach for her baby, but when she did she saw her hairy paws. "Noooo!" she moaned.

"You have behaved as a beast, so a beast you shall be!" said Diana.

Domiclese fought, but they were too strong for him and he was knocked unconscious. When he woke up, Diana was gone. So was the bear his sister had become. Only the baby was left alone on the bed, crying.


	2. The Stars

While Domiclese was still in shock, trying to pull himself together enough to at least find a nurse for the baby, two officers of the King Lycaon arrived.

"News of what has happened has come to the ears of the King," said one officer. "Rumors are flying that the child is actually the son of Zeus, and that it was his wife Hera's jealousy that goaded Diana to do what she did to your sister."

"I don't know," said Domiclese. "All I know is that Callisto is a bear and Arkas has no mother."

"We are under the King's orders to take his grandson into protection, to hide him in a secret cabin deep in the woods, with nurses and servants to care for him," said the second officer.

"The King fears that Hera might take vengeance on the child as well," said the first officer.

"Arkas may become the King's heir one day," said the second officer. "Sons of Zeus often become great heroes."

"That does not matter to me," said Domiclese. "I told my father long ago that I have no desire for the throne."

"Arkas will be well cared for and protected," said the first officer.

"He will be better off under the King's protection than my own. I couldn't even protect my own sister," said Domiclese.

"It was not the fault of yourself or your sister," said the second officer. "It is the will of the gods to toy with mortals at their whim."

"I hate them. I hate them all," said Domiclese.

"Be quiet," said the first guard. "It is dangerous to speak ill of the gods." He picked up Arkas and took him out to a nurse they had waiting for him.

The second guard stayed back for a moment and handed Domiclese a small flat stone with a symbol scratched on it. "When you are serious about doing something, show this stone to your friend Homerus."

Domiclese was too grief-striken to respond. After the second man left, he set the stone aside and sank to the floor, weeping.

***

Life had to go on. Each day when Domiclese led his sheep to pasture he also ventured into the woods, calling for Callisto. After a month of seeking he finally found her. He brought her food and tried to comfort her, but all of her former joy in life had turned to misery and despair.

"If only I knew how my son is doing," Callisto said. "I could take some comfort in that, even if I can never see him or hold him again."

"I know the king's people are caring for him," said Domiclese. "I will try to find out more."

***

It took him a long time, years in fact, since information about the boy was held in the tightest security for fear of the gods. Finally he discovered the location where Arkas lived, and that he had become a mighty hunter.

When he told Callisto she became obsessed with seeing Arkas again. She begged Domiclese to take her to him. He resisted for a while, but finally yeilded to the desire to bring her life a little happiness again.

He led Callisto that evening to the part of the woods where Arkas might be found, and there he was with a bow and a quiver of arrows. Arkas set an arrow in his bow and aimed it at her.

"Arkas!" Callisto called. "Don't shoot. I am your mother."

"That is what they all say," said Arkas, drawing back his bow. "Bear, your skin will decorate my floor."

There was a blue-green shimmer in the air, and everyone was held in place.

A large man appeared from the woods. "I am Zeus, here to avert this tragedy. My son will not kill his mother, and the mother will no longer be separated from her son."

The blue-green force pulled a bear cub from the forest, and a carpet like the one Diana had used appeared. In a few moments Zeus re-enacted the transfer that was done to Callisto, and now Arkas was also a bear. The bear in his body ran off into the woods.

Domiclese wanted to scream, but he could not move. This was what Zeus called averting a tragedy?

"They shall be together forever in the sky," Zeus said. His field of force flung them high and far, out of sight.

Domiclese found his attention drawn to a bright pattern of stars. Had they been there before? He wasn't sure.

"Domiclese, tell everyone what has happened," said Zeus. "Your sister Callisto and her son have become constellations. They are the Big Bear and the Little Bear; they will circle forever together in the northern sky."

Then Zeus was gone, and Domiclese could move again.

***

Domiclese returned home in a blind fury against the gods. He found the stone the officer gave him (marked with a moon crescent with a fish tail on its side) on a shelf in his home and sought out Homerus.

"My friend," said Homerus. "You are ready at last to join our secret society, dedicated to the overthrow of the gods of Olympus? It has a foolish-sounding code name to avoid suspicion, but I assure you we are completely serious: The Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel."


	3. The Great Robot War

"The Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel?" Domiclese repeated.

"Yes," said Homerus. "Follow me to our secret underground meeting place."

They entered a house in the town and went down steep stone steps to a basement. There was a meeting room with a banner hung in the front: three stars above the head of an Egyptian king, and a lunar crescent facing up below, with a diamond shape like a doorway in the middle of the crescent, divided into triangles.

Homerus said, "It started across the Mediterranean Sea, in the land of Egypt. That is where the gods first arrived from their portal, and they helped the people to build great stone buildings called pyramids. They were first worshiped there, but some people realized their evil and founded a society to oppose them."

"They are evil, and I will fight them to my last breath," said Domiclese.

"Good," said Homerus. "We need a volunteer for a dangerous mission, one that will prove to the world that the gods are vulnerable."

"I will do whatever it takes," said Domiclese.

"There are two factions among the metal beings who call themselves our gods. One group has a base high on a mountain, the Olympians. The second group used to rule, but they were overthrown and are now imprisoned underground, in Tartarus. It is this second group that will help us fight the Olympians and win."

"Tartarus, the place for those who offend the gods?" said Domiclese.

"Yes, sometimes mortals are taken there and placed in immortal bodies to suffer endless torment, like Tantalus and Sisyphus," said Homerus. "That is a fate you risk if this plan does not succeed."

"My life is already Tartarus," said Domiclese. "I will do it."

"Then you must speak with the leader of the Titans, Chronos, the god of Time," said Homerus.

He pushed a knob on the wall and a white screen lowered from the ceiling. Light glowed on it and an image came into view. It was a huge baby surrounded by a glowing field, with a infinity symbol made from two black triangles on its forehead.

"Do not be alarmed at his appearance," said Homerus. "He chooses to manifest himself as the Time Baby."

***

After the preparations the Time Baby had done to him were complete, Domiclese walked home.

At the house he found the two officers of King Lycaon who had visited him before.

"Domiclese, do you know where Arkas is?" asked the first man.

"It is a tragedy," said Domiclese. "Arkas was turned into a bear like my sister, by Zeus, and then he turned both into constellations. There they are in the northern sky: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor."

"No!" said the second guard. "This is the result of the king's provocation. He has been furious at Zeus because he seduced his daughter, and took the chance to seek vengeance today."

"Seduced?" said Domiclese. "Use the right word. Consent obtained in a false guise is no consent at all. He raped her."

"That is how the King saw it, too. When Zeus came to visit at noon today, the king served him a lunch of stewed meat. Then he told him it was made from his son, Arkas," said the first guard.

"That wasn't true," said Domiclese. "We saw Arkas alive this very evening."

"Zeus choked and spit out his food, and then the King admitted it was a lie to test if he was all-knowing. He said it also proved Arkas was the son of Zeus; then the King tried to obtain power over the gods by threatening to have Arkas killed," said the second guard.

"Did that work?" asked Domiclese.

"No. Zeus put him in the body of a wolf, and not just any wolf. It has a curse, which Zeus called a 'virus'. It causes others to turn into wolf-men themselves if they are bitten by him during the full moon," said the first guard.

"He said there will be a new race of monsters, the lycanthropes, the people of Lycaon. Those in professions likely to be bitten by dogs, such as those who carry messages and parcels from house to house, will be especially likely to become these creatures," said the second guard.

"Zeus must have been planning to get rid of Arkas and Callisto even before we saw him," said Domiclese, "It would remove his exposure to embarrassment and blackmail."

"I think you are right," said the second guard.

"What became of the King?" asked Domiclese.

"Lycaon ran off into the woods, and now we have no King and no royal heir," said the first guard.

"I am the King's son, and I will take the throne," said Domiclese. "But only for a short time. After I am gone, you will be my successor, because you gave me the stone."

He pointed to the second guard, who nodded gratefully. "Why only for a short time, your Majesty?"

"Because I have a plan to challenge the gods myself," said Domiclese.

"I understand your grief and your wish to join your family in death," said the first guard. "But please, not this way, your Majesty."

"You may be surprised," said Domiclese.

***

As his first act as King, he forbade the worship of Zeus in his domain, unless the god would come himself, in his true metal form, and defeat Domiclese in a staring contest.

Soon two huge metal figures appeared in the throne room.

"Which one of you is Zeus?" asked Domiclese.

"Your hubris is great, mortal," said the first metal figure. "Zeus has chosen to send me as his champion. I am Apollo, the Sun god. You will have to out-stare the Sun to win."

"And I am Mercury, messenger of Zeus," said the other figure. "I will convey you to Tartarus when you lose. And I will do one more trick to make the challenge more interesting."

Mercury zipped at almost invisible speed up the wall to the ceiling, where he tied a large sword by a single horse tail hair so that it dangled above the throne.

"Let's see how well you can concentrate with that threat poised above you," said Mercury.

"Are you ready to meet my burning gaze?" asked Apollo.

"I am ready," said Domiclese.

"I will stand beside Apollo to watch when your eyes blink or look away," said Mercury.

The moment the staring contest began, Domiclese opened his eyes wide and twin red beams of light shot out, one aimed at Apollo and one at Mercury. The beams entered the eyes of the robots and penetrated to their computer brains, shutting them down. He continued to stare until both were melted puddles of metal on the floor. Only then did he leave the throne and the threat of the sword above him.

"Your Majesty! How did you do that?" asked one of the courtiers.

"I have received a new body from a rival set of gods, the Titans. This body has what the Titans call a 'laser face', with beams of light so intense that they can melt the gods themselves."

"This will start a war with the gods," said another courtier.

"Bring it on," said Domiclese. "I will avenge my sister, my nephew, and my father."

***

"The war is over, Domiclese," said the Chronos the Time Baby. "I and his fellow Titans have been freed from Tartarus and have beaten the Olympians with the help of you and your people. What reward can I give you?"

"There is no reward that would restore my sister's life and happiness," said Domiclese. "Her life was ruined by the selfishness of the old gods. If only we could go back to the carefree days of our childhood together, and have things turn out differently."

"There is a way," said Chronos. "I am the lord of Time, after all."

***

Chronos transported Domiclese back in time, to before what happened with Zeus. Callisto was sixteen, full of her old happiness.

"Callisto!" Domiclese shouted when he saw her. They embraced.

"You're older," she said after a moment. "And taller."

"Not for long. Callisto, bad things are coming," he told her. "We need to leave this land and start a new life in a new country."

"If you say so, brother," said Callisto. "Where shall we go?"

"I have a friend, a god called Chronos. Don't be alarmed when you see him," said Domiclese.

The Time Baby manifested and after a quick gasp Callisto accepted him.

"I will make a copy of you to remain behind, so that the future will not change," said Chronos. "But you yourself will escape that tragic fate."

"That's a bit unfair on the copy," said Callisto.

"It cannot be helped," said Chronos. "We cannot disrupt the flow of events."

"Chronos is going to give us both new bodies that can be aged back, so we can be children and grow up together again with a new family," said Domiclese.

Soon this was arranged, and both stood before Chronos in new younger bodies, both about sixteen again.

"Your new bodies have powers that will manifest if you need them," said Chronos. "Domiclese, you will retain your laser face, flight, and telekinesis. These are powers you share with me. The red rays will be a sign of your friendship with the Time Baby for all time. You will be tougher than a normal mortal as well, capable of great leaps and able to withstand blows that would kill a normal man."

"Thank you," said Domiclese.

"I also grant you the ability to do the mathematical calculations of time travel, in case you ever need to resolve a paradox in your new time. We may need your services again one day."

"What about me?" asked Callisto. "What do I get?"

"I will give telekinesis as well," said Chronos. "And a shielding power, to project a human-sized ball of force around you and others that can bounce back attacks. Your telekinesis will let you fly, and lower yourself safely on a rope even when there is nothing to attach it to."

"Thank you!" said Callisto. "I like the human-sized ball especially."

"These powers will not be remembered by you all the time; that would be too disruptive. But you may use them in emergencies, and remember them in your dreams," said the Time Baby.

"All right," said Domiclese.

"Domiclese, I want to give you one more thing, a special mark on your forehead to commemorate how you fought and triumphed for the sake of your sister. I mark you with the pattern of the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major constellation."

When Callisto saw this she said, "Hey, that looks like a water dipper to me."

The Time Baby nodded and added the lines to show the Big Dipper.

"Now we will age you back even more, to babies, and place you with a family in the future that would otherwise not have any children. Your old memories will be hidden, unless someday they are needed again. You will make many happy memories in your new life," said Chronos.

"Will I have the same name?" asked Callisto.

"I think that name will be too unusual for your time. I will implant the suggestion in your new parents to name you something that also means 'Beautiful', like Mabel."

"Mabel. I like that name," said Callisto.

"I'll let my new family pick my name," said Domiclese. "Probably I'll just go by a nickname, anyway. With this mark on my forehead, I'm sure to be called Dipper."


	4. Robot 618

In the robo future-castle of Troy, Chronos the Time Baby floated and scowled.

"When will the humans give up this infernal siege?" he asked his assistant, a small robot named Coeus. "I wish Achilles, Odysseus, and all the rest would pack up their tents and go home."

"They seem very persistent, Lord Chronos," said Coeus. "Perhaps we shouldn't have forced humans to work in our underground mines to dig out igneous rocks for us."

"We needed fuel after our long stay in Tartarus, which was mostly lined with sedimentary rock," said Chronos. "Where is their gratitude for saving them from the old gods?"

"They say the New Robot Order is a worse tyranny than the rule of the Olympians we overthrew," said Coeus.

"Doesn't the legend of Domiclese inspire them any more?" asked Chronos.

"That was a generation ago. Now that we are out of favor, his story has been dropped from the heroic odes," said Coeus. "The only thing left is the part about him sitting under a dangling sword, and then they get his name wrong, as Damocles."

"What about Callisto?" asked Chronos.

"There's a vague memory that these wars started because of a beautiful woman," said Coeus. "But they've forgotten her name and gave her another in the odes. She is now called Helen of Troy."

"At least we cannot be overthrown like the Olympians. Even with what they learned of our weaknesses, and the advanced weapons they kept after the Great Robot War, there's no way they can break through our defenses," said Chronos.

"Time Agent Cassandra reports differently, Sire," said Coeus. "She says Troy will fall."

"I don't believe Agent Cassandra's warnings," said Chronos. "Troy is impregnable."

"It's good we sent away Domiclese and Callisto," said Coeus. "They will be safe in the New World of the future."

"That gives me an idea," said Chronos. "Just in case, we need to establish a back-up site with a cache of our technology and a working portal. We should put it in the New World, with a guardian bot we can spare. The trouble is, we need all of our best robots for defense."

"How about one of the robots manufactured at our base in Siam, Sire?" asked Coeus. "Could we spare one?"

"All but one was scrapped," said Chronos. "Their robot brains seemed to be defective. But with carefully restricted instructions I think we could use it."

Robot 618 lay on a table, rebooting. Red numerals in the Thai numbering system flashed across his eye screen. In a moment he popped up from the table and floated in the air.

He was a triangular bot with flat black arms and legs. On his face, below his single eye, was the logo of the Time Baby (a sideways triangular infinity symbol, which could be opened out to reveal a video monitor). He also had a top hat and cane that were purely decorative.

He said, in an annoyingly reverberating voice, "What can I do for you today, Boss?"

Chronos said, "Robot 618, we require you to set up a backup base and portal system on the continent across the ocean, in the wilderness near the western coast. The area is rich in igneous rocks. You may take appropriate slaves and bots for the task."

"Got it boss," said 618. "Then what?"

"You will be responsible for keeping it operational and guarded in case we ever have to use it," said Chronos.

"Yes, sir. May I recruit locals, too?" asked 618.

"Your interaction with humans must be kept to a minimum, for security reasons. You may only interact with them using your dream projector," said Chronos.

"My projector has only ten channels, Sire," said 618.

"That should be all you need," said Chronos. "You can reset the channels at will. Look for temporal hot-spots and concentrate your efforts there," said Chronos.

"At a higher power setting, I can enter human minds directly and control their actions," said 618.

"If you can find someone to give you permission, I will allow it," said Chronos. "Otherwise, stick to controlling animals. We don't want our reputation further compromised."

Robot 618 got the underground base excavated in record time. He didn't report how many slaves died in the process (which was all of them). Dead men tell no tales. There was an access port on the first underground floor, a technology cache on the second, and a portal room on the third. All of these floors were hidden underground and the land above was replanted to conceal them.

Robot 618 and the worker bots got the portal operational and tested it, accidentally pulling in a large colony of gnomes without their queen, manotaurs, merpeople, giant bats that could turn into vampires, and many other creatures from different dimensions. They were dumped into appropriate habitats and the experiments went on.

He sent the bots back to Chronos after building a communication box that could send and receive notes to and from the Time Baby. He got a message that the castle had fallen due to human trickery, a mechanical horse with humans inside. Then there was no word for a long while.

There was a long period of simply waiting, while the land remained a wilderness except for native people, who kept well out of his way. To amuse himself, he created a separate underground base with dinosaurs in time stasis, sealed in sap. They might be useful for cloning as weapons some day.

The land was explored by settlers, forming a country on the east coast and territories that eventually became states. The Oregon Trail was established in 1811. Robot 618 had already put some thought into controlling the direction of the new country so as to keep his caches safe. He went east and entered the dreams of the founding fathers, getting a representation of himself on the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. He had not yet been able to get his face on any currency, though he would have liked to out of a sense of pride.

Finally he decided to take a more direct hand in political matters. He visited the dreams of Sir Lord Quentin Trembley, III, Esquire in his dreams and gave him a summoning formula.

Quentin's main claim to fame at that point in his political career was that he had lived near Mount Vernon as a small child, and he had pestered the retired first President of the United States, George Washington, to the point where the old man chased after him and spanked him. Trembley was a political underling in the Democratic party and seemed likely to remain so, until one night when he tried the formula from his dreams.

"Backwards message, backwards message, backwards message!" he called, and there was a sense of time flowing backwards as 618 time-traveled in.

The triangular figure with one eye floated before him, "Hi there, Quentin. How would you like to be President?"

"You know me? Who are you?" asked Trembley.

"I'm called 618," said the robot.

"That is not a name, but a cipher," said Trembley.

"It isn't a secret message," said 618.

"I didn't mean that," said Trembley. "In my youth, 'cipher' meant a number, and to cipher was to do arithmetic."

"Well, my number is just a sequence number," said 618. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Like the serial numbers we put on our dollar bills?" said Trembley.

"Yes. Hmm... Bill... Cipher. I'm going to keep that name."


	5. Landslide

Quentin Trembley, more stupid and ambitious than insane at this point, said, "Yes, I want to become President. But how?"

"Leave it to me," said Bill Cipher. "All I need is permission to enter your mind to set things up."

"But the 1836 election year is almost over. How can I possibly run for President now?" asked Trembley.

"Don't worry about running for the office – yet," said Bill. "I have a plan."

They shook on the deal with a blue flamed handshake.

***

The Democratic candidates, Martin Van Buren and Richard Mentor Johnson, got the majority of the popular vote. (The opposing party, the Whigs, ran two Presidential candidates in hopes of splitting the electoral college vote and throwing the decision of who should be President to the House of Representatives, which they controlled. This strategy was a failure.)

But before the electoral college could meet and actually elect Van Buren and Johnson, the two men simply disappeared. This was the result of cursed doorways (mobile dimensional portals) set up by Bill Cipher.

The disappearance was covered up, with the Democrats pretending Van Buren was in seclusion preparing for the challenge of leading the nation.

Leading Democratic senators Thomas Hart Benton and Felix Grundy met to discuss the crisis.

"This event is unprecedented, and not covered by the Constitution," said Benton. "We don't even know if they are alive or dead. The electoral college can't elect dead men."

"The country's in an economic mess already after the real-estate bubble collapsed," said Grundy. "If there's a crisis of leadership everyone will be ruined."

"If the electoral college fails to pick a President, the decision will go to the House, and you know a Whig will be elected," said Benton.

"That would create a public uproar," said Grundy. "The Whigs will be accused of making off with the winning candidates in order to win, and that might even be the truth. The result could be the civil war we're been trying so hard to avoid."

"I have an idea," said Benton. "It came to me in a dream. The college just picks the name of the man to be elected. All we have to do is get someone to temporarily have his name legally changed to 'Martin Van Buren', let the college vote go through, and swear him in as President."

"I had the same dream," said Grundy. "It must be an omen. Let's prepare a short list of candidates."

***

Quentin Trembley was one of the new candidates, all Democrats. They met in a remote rural area early in January, 1837, to give political speeches and be elected as the person to stand in for Van Buren.

Bill Cipher was in Trembley's mind, to stand him in exactly the right place and to click a button to trigger an avalanche and a landslide, killing all the other candidates. Trembley was the victor by default.

Trembley summoned Bill that evening.

"What have you done?" Trembley demanded. "I didn't want to murder my way into office."

"You didn't specify the means," said Cipher. "You left it up to me. Now you owe me, and the Time Baby I work for."

Trembley asked in a quivering voice, "What Time Baby?"

While Cipher explained, Trembley began his escape from what he had done, into insanity.

***

Trembley was sworn in on March 4, 1837. The general public still believed it was Van Buren who was elected. News coverage was limited in those days and easily subverted by those in power, but it was difficult to stop the report that the new President's first speech was, "The only thing we have to fear is giant man-eating spiders. Seriously – run!"

The mad President began doing things he thought a Time Baby would like. He appointed six babies to the Supreme Court. Since babies don't wear pants, he made the "Depantsipation Proclamation," a law that prohibited people from wearing pants. From pants to pancakes was but a short step in his mind, so he declared war on pancakes.

Most of these things did less harm than they might sound, because of the balance of powers in the Constitution. Congress didn't ratify his Supreme Court appointments or his declaration of war. The pants law was enforced only in his presence.

Cipher asked for his face on some money, so Trembley commanded the Department of the Treasury to issue negative twelve dollar bills, with his own face on the front and Bill in the seal on the back. He explained that with a negative twelve bill combined with a twenty, one could buy an eight-dollar item with only two bills instead of four, saving paper. The Treasury complied, but it was a highly limited edition.

In exchange for the currency appearance, Cipher gave him a high-tech skeleton key, which Trembley took to be a President's key. It could pick any lock in America by adaptively morphing its unstable molecules.

After less than a year in office, Trembley gave up completely. He ate a salamander and jumped out the window of the Oval Office, making his escape on a horse he rode backwards.

Bill produced the original Van Buren and Johnson from time stasis, implanting false memories of being lost in the wilderness. They were happily accepted back to finish out the term for which they were elected, and the history of Trembley was buried.

***

Bill thought Trembley might still be useful, so he guided his backwards-riding horse to the West. Trembley went backwards over a waterfall cliff; Bill's telekinetic force prevented fatality. Trembley was where he needed to be, near the hidden portal base.

Gravity Falls was founded; Trembley enacted a "Finder's Keepers" law that said possession of a deed was enough to convey ownership. He also made it legal to marry woodpeckers.

The federal government, worried and embarrassed by the terrible Presidency, sent agents to deal with Trembley. Before they got there, Trembley created a secret chamber, and clues to lead to it.

Bill had told him about the dinosaurs encased in sap. Trembley's idea was to seal himself up, like them, but in peanut brittle. He expected to emerge in a more forgiving time, when people would seek him out and solve his bizarre clues. Bill applied time stasis before he could smother in the candy, and closed up the secret passage to the hidden chamber. The nut might be useful again someday.

***

Bill began to think about getting a new human helper. It was useful to have someone who could interact with people other than in dreams.

He put a message into the Time Baby's mailbox, "Robot 618 here. I need assistance in getting a strong, very long-lived human to help me guard the secrets of the base."

A message came back, "Robot 618, we are in hiding, struggling along. But we do have time agents again. I'll get someone on it for you and keep you informed."

In his new hiding place in a cave in what would become Carlsbad, New Mexico, the Time Baby thought over the request and called in Special Time Agent Cassandra (promoted after her Troy warning proved true).

"Cassandra, there is a loose end, a child with a superior genetic makeup that could have lived a very long time, but who is slated to die young at the hands of Zeus."

"What do you want me to do, Sire?" asked Cassandra.

"Pick up Arkas, son of Callisto, as a baby. Replace him with a clone, and plant the original with a family on the Oregon Trail, a family that has so many children they will hardly notice," said Chronos.

"How will I be sure I have the right baby?" Cassandra asked.

"There was a small detail that Domiclese didn't notice, in the crisis of the day of Arkas' birth, or when he saw him again that last day from a distance: Arkas has six fingers on his right hand. Callisto's copy probably noticed, but Domicles didn't."

"That's unusual," Cassandra said.

"Sons of the gods always have something extra," said Chronos. "It can be extra abilities as well as birth defects. We ought to pick up that other child of Zeus with the hand growing out of his head. He would make a useful leader during the American Civil War. But Arkas first, that other guy second."

Cassandra did this. She time-traveled in and swapped out the clone easily enough, but the strong baby squirmed, fell out of her arms, and got dropped on his chin. She put an adhesive bandage on to prevent infection, and carelessly left it on when she dropped off the baby.

***

Fertilia Mecc woke from a doze to find a new baby in her arms. She seemed to have given birth in her sleep. Oh well, another set of little hands to render the tallow.

Soon after, two more children appeared. They acted strangely, showing off a button machine and shoes that blinked. The girl talked of women getting the vote, and high-fives. After that, they vanished.

(Dipper and Mabel were unaware that buried family instincts and enhanced android senses had guided them to run from stampeding buffalo in this direction and jump into this particular wagon. Mabel didn't realize the baby with the band-aid was her own son.)

Time Agent Blendin Blandin popped in to clean up the mess after the twins were gone. He found no calculators this time, but he applied mind-wipes to everyone to remove the futuristic ideas. Unlike the brats who stole his time machine and got him in trouble, these people were not immune to wiping. He missed the anachronistic band-aid, since it didn't bear tachyon traces from his own time machine.

"Too bad my idea of making it so their parents never met was firmly vetoed by the Time Baby," he thought. "Oh well, mine is not to reason why."


	6. Six-Fingers

Fiddleford Homer Mecc grew up in big family of candle-makers in the vicinity of what would one day be Gravity Falls. Times were hard, and sometimes the only way the pioneer family could draw sustenance was by reading stories together around the fire. Fiddleford sometimes ate the books; with his demigod constitution he could digest the paper. He survived, when many of the other children died.

At fifteen he ran away to the coast. He found a rough-looking saloon by the waterfront, and he strutted in, trying to look tough.

"What do ya want, kid?" asked the barkeep.

"I'm lookin' fer work on a ship," said Fiddleford.

"Hah!" said the barkeep. "Ya look like a landlubber to me, and ya smell like tallow, not tar."

"What's that thing on your beard, candle-maker?" asked a tough customer, coming nearer.

"This is my lucky stripe. I've had it on my face since I was a baby, born with it on my chin, my mother says," said Fiddleford.

"What's it good fer?" asked the barkeep.

"It's made of a tough stuff what never wears out. It has glue on the back what never loses its stickum. When my beard grew out I just kept it on the beard."

"I want it," said the tough customer. "Give it here."

The man reached for the strip, but Fiddleford grabbed his wrist in one hand and slammed it to the bar.

"Nobody touches my lucky stripe," said Fiddleford.

The tough customer backed off, rubbing his wrist. "Hey, this guy's strong as a bear."

Another man in a dark blue coat came up to Fiddleford.

"I like the cut of your jib, mate," said the man. "I'm Jake, the Pirate King. How'd ya like to join me crew?"

"Sure as shootin'," said Fiddleford.

"What's yer name?" asked Jake.

"I'm Fiddleford Mecc – I mean," he looked under the bar for an inspiration for a tougher-sounding alias, and spotted a tin bucket being used as a spittoon. "I'm Pirate McGucket, what spits in a bucket."

He aimed a shot of spit into the container, which gave out a ring when it hit.

"Welcome to my crew, Pirate McGucket," said the pirate.

***

McGucket spent a few years as a pirate, going up and down the West Coast looking for trading ship prey. He even became a pirate captain himself. But the living for pirates in a sailing vessels fell off as more steam-powered ships came into use.

McGucket heard of the gold discovered at Sutter's Mill in California and became a prospector for a while. He never struck it rich, so after that he became a naturalist and explorer. It turned out he was a skilled artist (a talent he inherited from his mother, Callisto/Mabel). He traveled around the country, exploring and selling his wildlife sketches for a living.

Finally, in 1865, he felt drawn back to his home region, which was now called Gravity Falls. All the Meccs had died or moved away by this time and their candle business was gone, but he fixed up the old abandoned house as a place to stay. He continued to call himself McGucket.

He explored the region and found many curious things. In all his travels, he had never discovered such a place. Investigating creatures like gnomes, floating eyeballs, and vampires could get dangerous, but with his strength and wilderness skills he was more than up to the challenge.

He bought a set of three journals with burgundy covers and brass corners, and added a numbered six-fingered hand decoration to the cover of each. He began filling them up with notes and sketches.

***

One day, he found a pair of brown bib-and-brace overalls in a hollow stump. He tried them on instead of his worn-out clothing and found they fit. He knew there was nothing in the pockets when he put them on, but later when he reached into a pocket for his handkerchief he felt a crinkly piece of paper. He pulled out a note of currency.

"Hoo-wee!" McGucket said. "Magic money pants!"

The bill turned out to be for negative twelve dollars, less than worthless, but he put it into his wallet anyway. It might be worth something as a collector's item.

***

McGucket began to have dreams where a odd triangular-shaped being visited him. This happened every night for weeks. It repeated "618, 618, 618" and showed him a ring with ten spaces in it. Only one space was filled, with the six-fingered hand symbol on his journals. He recorded all of this on a page in his second journal.

It also recited a summoning formula, which he recorded on the next page. On that same page, he sketched the creature as it was depicted on the negative twelve dollar bill in his wallet.

He decided to try out the summoning. As directed, he put out candles in a ring within a birch wood where the tree patterns looked like eyes. He recited the formula, ending with "Backwards message, backwards message, backwards message."

There was a sense of time slowing down and flowing backwards, and the world around turned gray. The yellow triangular being appeared.

"Hi, Fiddleford McGucket," said the entity.

"Who are ya?" asked McGucket.

"I'm going back to my code number for now, for security reasons," said the being. "Call me 618."

"What do ya want?" McGucket asked.

"I'd like to show you more of the mysteries around here, Six-Fingers. In return, I'm going to need your help to find some people. They're associated with those symbols I showed you on my ring."

"I only saw the one symbol," McGucket said. "My own journal-cover thingy."

"That will change as we get more information," said the being. "I've made an open channel from the future to this point in time. A loop-back like that is risky, but it will save time in the long run."

"I don't reckon I follow ya, but I'll help ya so I can larn more about this region," said McGucket.

***

As time went on, the relationship between 618 and McGucket seemed to grow into friendship. They went underground to see a cave full of dinosaurs preserved in sap. McGucket sketched them, especially the pterodactyl. He built a church over the site, with an eye-like symbol over the door that suggested 618's single eye.

Eventually, once 618 decided he could be trusted, he was shown the secret entrance to an underground base with two floors, the first filled with amazing technology and the other with a portal the being said would lead to other worlds, once it was given some maintenance repair and recharged.

He built a simple, triangular-wedge-shaped cabin over the underground site, and moved in there.

McGucket was fascinated and set himself to learn all he could about the science, mathematics, and physics behind this advanced technology. He copied the activation code settings; Entity 618 insisted that he spread the diagram out over his three separate journals, for security.

McGucket added, on one of the pages in a symbolic code of his own, "The portal when completed will open a gateway to infinite new worlds and herald a new era in mankind's understanding of the universe. Plus, it will probably get girls to start talking to me finally."

There was a girl in particular in town he had his eye on, Kate Everclean. His growing confidence with technology let him start a small company of his own; he finally was able to talk to her, date her, and marry her. Unfortunately his secrecy and obsessions led to her leaving him within a year, but not before they had a son together; she got custody. In anger, he built his first attack robot, modeled on the pterodactyl he had seen. It created a lot of destruction in town, but it was never traced to him.

***

"I only saw two symbols," McGucket said. "My own journal-cover thingy and a pair of glasses."

"That will change as we get more information," said the being. "There are a couple of kids we need to get into the area. I don't have symbols for them; they aren't even born yet. Before that, we need a relative of theirs here, so that their parents can send them to stay with him in the summer of 2012."

"I don't reckon I follow ya, but I'll help ya so I can larn more about this region," said McGucket.

"Find out what you can about a man named Stan Pines," said 618. "He will become the grandfather of the children one day. I'm not even sure where he lives. Somewhere on the East Coast. I need to find out now so I can take steps to get him here."

***

Many years later, McGucket was able to report, in a dream, "Yes-siree, 618. I found the man, Stanford Pines. Seems he had a bit of trouble with the law, and there was some records I could get hold of with your fancy tools here. Seems he's in jail in Columbia."

"All right," said 618. "I'll start pulling some strings to get him free."

***

In jail in Columbia, Samuel Pines, alias Stanford Pines, alias Stanley Pines (which was actually his twin brother's name), was trying to be buddies with his cell-mates Jorge and Rico.

"Jorge, Rico, you're the two best Colombian prison friends a fellah could make.

Jorge said, in Spanish, "I hope he dies."

Rico said, also in Spanish, "Yes."


	7. Fez Symbol

Samuel Pines grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey in the late 1940's, along with his twin Stanley.

It was a tough neighborhood. He was picked on as a kid until his father made both him and his brother take wrestling and boxing lessons. Sam took to it, but his brother Stanley never really did, attending all the matches with his nose in a book.

Sam often envied his older-by-ten-minutes brother, the smart one and the "good kid" of the family. Outwardly they never really got along, but at a deeper level there was a strong brotherly affection.

In his teens, Sam was waiting in line for a "Grampa the Kid" western when a young woman in line ahead of him was attacked by a purse-snatcher. Sam decked the thief with a punch and ended up watching the movie with the grateful young woman, Carla McCorkle, later nicknamed "Hot Pants."

They dated well into the seventies, while Sam developed his first business, selling "Stan Vac" vacuum cleaners (invented by his brother) door to door. He developed selling skills that would help him the rest of his life. His first slogan, "Nothing sucks like a Stan Vac," he improved to "Nothing sucks it up like a Stan Vac," and sales weren't bad.

Sam and Carla had been living together for a couple of years when Carla met someone new, a hippie-style musician named Thistle Downe. She converted her style from hot pants to bell bottoms and eventually left Stan for Thistle. In revenge for stealing his girlfriend, Stan stole Thistles's van and drove it into a ditch. This was his first serious brush with the law and he did jail time for it.

He emerged from jail with new connections, a second-story burglar and a counterfeiter to start with. He was bitter over his loss of Carla and didn't care anymore what he did, as long as there was money in it. He later branched out and worked with drug dealers, which took him to Columbia and a term in jail there under the alias of Stanford Pines. He has also used the name of Stanley at times, in revenge for being disowned by his goody-two-shoes brother.

Someone pulled some strings for him and he was able to get out of jail early on the condition that he never return to Columbia. He was happy enough to do that. He returned to the United States with nothing but the phone number of a new contact, a man in Oregon named McGucket.

"Hello, is this Fiddleford McGucket? This is Stan Pines."

"By crickey, good to hear from ya," said the man in a cracked old voice.

"I hear you helped get me out of jail and you got some kind of job for me," said Stan.

"Yeppers, I do," said McGucket. "You're a scientist, right?"

"Umm... yeah, sure. Especially chemistry," said Stan.

"Good. I'd like ya to come out and work with me on a whangdoodle of a project," said McGucket.

"I'd like to come and check it out, but... I'm broke. Can you send me some money to get there?"

McGucket sent him some advance money and Stan bought a used maroon El Diablo. He drove it across the country, first knocking over a military supply shop for a military-grade grappling hook and using it to pull some second-story burglaries along the way. By the time he reached Gravity Falls, Oregon, he had a good supply of cash.

He drove out to the address McGucket gave him, 618 Gopher Road. There was a run-down, two-story, wedge-shaped shack. The man who met him at the door had a long white beard with a band-aid on it. He wore brown overalls and a worn-out hillbilly hat.

"Howdy Stan, I'm Fiddleford McGucket."

"Umm... Howdy, McGucket," said Stan.

This didn't look promising. Still, Gravity Falls seemed like a good place to lie low for a while, even if the project didn't pan out.

"Come down and see the lab-ratory," said McGucket.

Stan was much more impressed when he was shown the underground part of the property. There was valuable-looking stuff here.

"This is all yours?" he asked McGucket.

"Yes-siree bob. I've been homesteadin' here for more years than I'd like to think about, larning all 'bout this cache of alien tech I found buried here, and about all the strange critters hereabouts," said McGucket.

The next day, on the pretense of shopping for stuff he would need to move into the shack, Stan went to look up the property ownership records in town. He discovered the land had no registered owner, so he snapped it up cheap with the loot he had brought, cheap because the land was rumored to be haunted. No need to tell McGucket about the deed just yet, but now 618 Gopher Road, its surrounding land, and all it contained was his, in the name of Stanford Pines.

That evening, McGucket said, "Now I gotta introduce ya to my 'fishing buddies', the boys in the Lodge."

"I'd like that," said Stan. "I love to fish, but only if I've got someone to do it with."

"We do more than fish," said McGucket. "The Lodge is the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, the keepers of the secrets of the universe!"

"Oh brother," thought Stan.

McGucket drove him out to an old church in the woods. Several other cars were gathered there.

McGucket introduced the other members.

The first man was skinny, had glasses, wore a fishing hat and an orange life-vest, and had sunscreen on his nose. "This is Ernie Wyler, a co-worker o' mine in town. I do some engineerin' on the side."

The second man was heavyset and bald, with a lot of hair on his arms and hair stubble on his chin. He wore brown fishing vest with four pockets, jeans, and black boots. "This here is Phil Andry."

McGucket whispered to Stan, "Ya can introduce him to your robot grand-kids as Uncle Phil, when they gets here in 2012. More relatives will make 'em feel nice and folksy in Gravity Falls."

"Huh? Robot grand-kids?" asked Stan. "2012?"

"I'll explain later," said McGucket.

He moved on to introduce the next man, Barney "Big Mouth" Jackson, named for his large mouth with buck teeth. He wore a fishing hat with fish-hooks stuck in it, a teal t-shirt, and beige overalls with a pocket in front.

"And this here is Wally Beavis." He was a short man with yellow buck teeth, with a gray mustache and beard. He wore an orange cap.

"Finally, this here is my boy, Achilles McGucket." The young man had floofy brown hair (like his grandmother, Mabel), and he wore a baseball cap pulled over his eyes.

They went inside the church. Two of the members set up a banner with three stars, the head of a pharaoh, and a crescent moon below with a door in it. McGucket pulled down a screen and set up a projector.

"For the benefit of our new member, Stan Pines, this movie will explain why we worship owls in this Lodge."

The movie began and the face of a bearded man filled the screen. "I am Chronos, or Chronus, also known as Father Time when I choose to appear old rather than as a Time Baby. I am the first of the Greek gods known as the Titans. You may have heard the legends of me eating my children, the second generation of Greek gods, the Olympians. Nothing messy happened, I assure you. We're robots. All I really did, when I realized the kids were going to be trouble, was to store their programs in compressed form on my disks, denying them robot bodies."

Stan started to nod off in one of the pews.

"But one escaped. My wife Rhea fed me a dummy copy of my son Zeus, and secretly gave him a body. Metis, the Titan goddess of wisdom, became his lover and helped him free the other Olympians from my backup disks. They overthrew us for a time, a dark age after the golden age of our rule.

"Zeus turned against Metis and ate her in compressed form, but not before she spawned his daughter Athena, the Olympian goddess of wisdom, within his operating system. Athena was difficult to contain, so he was forced to give her a robot body. Athena created a robot owl, Bubo, but in fact this was a new body for Metis. Athena's owl became a spy for the Titans who helped us briefly regain control for a New Robot Order, which sadly collapsed in its turn."

The movie ended.

"And that is why we worship owls, a symbol of the wisdom of the Titans, in the hope that they may one day rise again," said Ernie.

Stan was snoring in the pew, but suddenly woke up. "Yeah, I get it. That's why we worship owls."

The fishermen took a liking to Stan and soon he was spending every weekend at Gravity Falls Lake, fishing with them.

Stan rose to the rank of Great Guppy, second in command, with a crescent-shaped fish symbol on his fez instead of the plain blank one. McGucket was the Big Fish, with the symbol of a Pac-Man like fish about to chomp on an oval object.

Meanwhile, McGucket was becoming suspicious of Stan. He just didn't know enough science to be the man he was supposed to be. McGucket created a new set of notes outside his journals, and copied his most important work there. In code, he added the note, "Stan is not what he seems."

One day, McGucket confronted Stan. "Ya ain't really the man of science you said you was. You don't know diddly-squat about eigenvectors."

Stan sighed. "I'm trying to learn, but I'm not a science type like my twin brother Stanley is," he said.

"It's him we needs to get here," said McGucket.

"He's married and teaching back East," said Stan. "I'm not on the greatest terms with him, but I'll help you get in touch with him. But not to replace me; I'm sticking around."

"Ya got your uses, in your way," said McGucket. "The Lodge guys like ya, so all right."

Bill Cipher assigned Stan a new position on the wheel, as the "Fez Symbol," keeping the old "Glasses" position for his brother Stanley.

***

"I only saw three symbols," McGucket said. "My own journal-cover thingy a pair of glasses, and a fish-shaped thingummy."

"That will change as we get more information," said the being. "Those other symbols are for two brothers, the Pine twins Stanford and Stanley. We need to get both of them here."


	8. Glasses and the Portal

Bill Cipher, or "618" as he was still called by McGucket, wasn't happy about the mistaken identity that had brought Samuel Pines onto the ring in the first place, but there was no question of just replacing him with his brother. Time travel theory warned about using knowledge from the future to change outcomes in the past. Firstly, unless you really knew what you were doing, the old outcomes would tend to persist. Secondly, even if you did succeed, there would be side effects that would make you regret it. Time tended to defend itself from unnatural change.

They would have to bring in Samuel (aka Stanford) first, and then Stanley, and let things proceed from there. There were risks of instabilities even so. Bill was changing the meaning of a wheel symbol; that was big.

***

Stanford dug up his old phone number for Stanley and called him.

"Hey Stanley, remember me? This is Sam."

"Sam... why are you calling me? I told you I didn't want to speak with you after you got mixed up in crime."

"Lighten up, bro. I've discovered something amazing. It's the scientific breakthrough of a lifetime."

"Spare me the lies. I will not get involved in one of your get-rich-quick schemes."

"Listen to this: the quantum-mechanical hybrid manifold can be expressed by the formula..." Sam rattled off a complex equation he had written down and practiced with McGucket until he could recite it perfectly.

"Why... It's ingenious! Where did you get that? Who are you working with?" asked Stanley.

"Just a moment, I'll put him on," said Sam.

He handed the phone to McGucket and an excited techno-babble conversation ensued.

"He's comin',: said McGucket after they hung up. "But not his wife right away. They're gettin' their son off to college."

"College, huh," said Stan. "I learned in the school of hard knocks."

"Me too," said McGucket. "Look how fer it got us."

Stan looked at McGucket and grimaced.

***

Stanley wasn't pleased with the lack of room in the shack. With the help of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, they added a new wing to the shack and fixed up an extra bedroom on the ground floor. "Big Mouth" contributed a nicely-engraved wooden door instead of the old plain one.

He was delighted, however, with the technology available on the second basement floor, and set out to reverse-engineer some of the items for his own experiments.

On the third basement floor, Stanley found the three journals, opened to their diagram pages. Seeing that there was more to the books, he took the second book and flipped through it. There was a diagram of 618 and his ring, and there was picture of his own glasses on that ring. He got out a pen and wrote three exclamation points, with an arrow pointing to the glasses.

He showed the image of 618 to McGucket.

"Mr. McGucket, what is this? Did you draw this?"

"Yes-siree, I wrote it years and years ago, afore you was born, I reckon," said McGucket. "It's old critter number 618, what appeared in my dreams for a while. Lots of strange critters around these parts."

"But this picture: it's of my glasses," said Stanley. "Exactly my style."

"Coincidence, I reckon," said McGucket, with a hint of evasiveness in his voice.

"Some creature predicted me coming here, before I was born," said Stanley. "Why? I will not be put off with lies."

"It's somethin' about the future, somethin' it can see," said McGucket. "You're not here only because of your science know-how, but because of your twin grand-kids what'll be here in 2012. It's a big year for some hootenanny with the portal."

"I've got to know more. This is my son's future children we're talking about," said Stanley.

"I ain't so sure they's really gonna be your son's kids," said McGucket. "That 618, he said somethin' to me about them really bein' androids, which I reckon is a fancy word for robots."

"What else?" asked Stanley.

"Don't know much more than that. If ya wanna check it out, my advice is, be careful. He watches them what is on his ring, ya know."

This conversation increased the paranoia and suspicions of both McGucket and Stanley, and both began taking measures for security.

Stanley borrowed the books one at a time and wrote his own coded notes. He figured out how to reset the portal codes. But he delayed doing anything drastic; there were years of study ahead to learn the alien technology for the benefit of mankind, and plenty of time to avoid his son's being tricked with fake robot children.

McGucket did the same, and added to his page about possible hiding places for the books, something he had thought about long ago to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Now he thought maybe their own hands were the wrong hands, especially if Stan got involved.

McGucket showed the picture of 618 in the second journal to Stan.

"Do ya know anythin' about this guy?" McGucket asked.

"Bill Cipher?" said Stan. "I know nothing about him. Anyway, it was all just a dream. I forgot any other specific details. Honest."

***

Stanley's wife, Ruth, was able to get their son, Stanley Jr., off to college. She came out to join her husband.

Their bedroom was the room with the engraved door that the Royal Order had fixed up for them. She added many personal touches, like a set of fancy glass decanters next to a photograph of her with long hair, and a decorative prism to catch the light from the side windows.

The couch in the room had a pull-out bed. It wasn't fancy, but it would do while they investigated the wonders of alien science together, for Ruth was as advanced and avid a scientist as her husband.

Ruth and Stanley together made several experiments, none more successful than Experiment 78, a light-blue carpet that could build up a powerful static charge. It could swap minds, just like the one which had been used on their to-be grand-daughter to turn her into a bear. They put it into their bedroom for a different use; to experiment in their marriage in ways they couldn't have done without it.

They also studied the journals together in their room, with Ruth adding new notes in red. One night, in a playful, romantic mood, they did a game of tic-tac-toe on one of the pages in red ink.

In the winter of 1981, Stanley's son, Stanley Jr., was visiting from college on a winter break, looking very grown-up in a black t-shirt. He was in the living room alone when he heard a crackling noise and shouts outside the shack. He opened the door and saw nobody there; he had just missed seeing his children.

Stanley Jr. closed the door, got boots and a coat, and went outside. He found two sets of child-sized footprints, one without a left shoe. The prints skidded to a halt and then disappeared. He told his parents about them later, but by then wind and new snow had erased the prints. Ruth and Stanley were concerned, but decided not to tell him about his possible future children at this time. The visit was going so well that they didn't want to distress him.

***

It was the evening of the fourth of July, 1982. Stan was off in town to watch the fireworks. Stanley and Ruth were in their room. McGucket was writing in his room a new page titled, "Bill Cipher," with a much darker image of the entity. He wrote down a verbal code he had discovered that would force Bill to take someone along into a dreamscape when Bill invaded someone's mind. He planned to use it the next time Stan seemed to be under the influence of a dream from Cipher, which he suspected was happening a lot these days.

On the page with the image he started to write his new concerns about Bill's character. Nervously he wrote at the top, "Is he watching me?" He wrote down a list of codes and scratched out each one, codes he suspected Bill had broken.

Something seemed to go fuzzy in his mind. He looked down at the page again and realized he had written, "Bill has proven himself to be one of the friendliest and most trustworthy individuals that I've ever encountered in my life. What a guy! I honestly can't trust him more. Not evil in any way, Bill is a true gentleman."

Bill was in him, McGucket knew, trying to possess him.

"I've got you," Bill's voice said, echoing in his mind.

McGucket did the only thing he could. He put the extra little finger of his right hand into his mouth, and bit it off. Blood spurted over the page. The pain cleared his mind and he was able to shake off Bill, for the moment at least.

"I withdraw permission for ya to enter my mind!" he said. Bill was momentarily halted while he tried to override this programming with his emergency codes.

McGucket seized the book and ran for the room of Ruth and Stanley.

"The demon knows I'm onto him!" McGucket shouted. "He'll be after you next. Time to carry out our plan."

***

A few moments later, McGucket came out of the room carrying Journal 3 and a shovel. They had written last, hasty notes in it with Ruth's red pen, warning anyone who found the book about Bill: "Can't be trusted," and "Do not summon at all costs!"

Bill followed him and tried to get into his mind, but McGucket somehow shook him off. Bill worried that McGucket was leading him far away from the house and that worse things might be happening back there, with the portal. He rushed back.

Stanley was at the portal switch. He had entered new codes and now was powering it up. The machine was not completely functional, but it could be overloaded and destroyed.

"We're onto ya, monster!" Stanley shouted. "Ya won't be able to re-activate this portal to invade our world."

"We invaded you centuries ago. We just need reinforcements to take over again," said Bill. "Darkness is coming."

Bill swooped at Stanley, but found that, just as with McGucket, something was blocking his access channel. The only glimpse of a thought he caught was that they had written the new configuration codes in Journal 2, in hopes that one day humanity might profit from the knowledge of the portal once the alien robots were defeated.

Stanley ran through the mis-configured portal, and vanished. The power surge caused the emergency protective circuits to shut the portal down. Without the new access codes it could not be restarted.

Bill went back to the table where the journal pages were used. Journals 2 and 3 were gone, and so were any clues to the changed codes. Ruth had escaped in her car, possibly taking one of the journals with her. Or possibly McGucket had hidden them both in Gravity Falls.

Bill located McGucket in the woods and beamed in a dream of himself, huge and red.

"Where have you hidden the journals? I'm getting mad, and you won't like me when I'm mad!"

"No way!" said McGucket, and clammed up.

"Eat nightmares, little man," said Bill, full of a raging desire for revenge.

The nightmares entered the man's mind, driving him insane.

***

Years later, there was a ring at the doorbell of the house of the Pines family in Piedmont, California.

"Why, it's Grandma Ruth, come to visit the babies," said Edith Pines. "What a wonderful surprise! We haven't heard from you in years."

"Stanley and I have been busy in Gravity Falls, working on inventions with his brother, Grunkle Stan, but I just had to break away to see the babies," Ruth lied.

"The babies are sleeping," said Edith. "But you can look in on them now if you like."

"Thank you, I'll do that," said Ruth.

She walked down the hall, carrying a small suitcase, and entered the room where Callisto and Domiclese, now called Mabel Edith Pines and Frederic Stanley Pines, lay sleeping. (The Pines family had a tradition of naming their kids after characters in "Pirates of Penzance").

Ruth opened the suitcase and took out a green glowing amulet on a bolo tie string, and Journal 2. The amulet was charged with two death blasts that would put an end to these robot imposters, further ruining the plans of the monster who had killed her Stanley. (The death blast method was recorded in Journal 1, separated from the other instructions about using the amulet in Journal 2, for security reasons).

Callisto's sleeping mind sensed the danger, and began to dream about human-sized hamster balls.

Ruth aimed the first attack at Callisto. "Avada kedavra!"

The pink hamster balls of force came up around Callisto and Domiclese, bouncing back the green attack beam. Ruth disintegrated without a second to scream.

Later, Mabel and Frederic's parents found the suitcase and the book with its bolo-tie bookmark on the floor of the babies' room. It appeared to be a children's book, a present from their grandmother, but after looking it over they decided it was unsuitable for small kids. They wondered where Grandma Ruth had gone off to so suddenly.

The book, with its bookmark, was donated to a bookmobile and taken cross-country, ending up years later in Orlando, Florida. A used car salesman named Bud Gleeful bought it as a gift for his young son, Gideon, a precocious reader at age seven.


	9. Mystery Shack Startup

The years after the loss of the portal codes were a terrible time for Bill. He had to find the two lost journals by 2012, or he would be in deep trouble with the Time Baby.

McGucket, now clearly insane, was forced into retirement from his engineering company in town. His Lodge buddy Ernie Wyler didn't attend the retirement party, out of grief for the man McGucket had once been. That didn't stop McGucket from taking offense and building an 80-ton robot to follow Ernie around, saying "Shame, shame." It was quite a job for Ernie and the Lodge brothers to disable it.

***

Ernie, Phil, Wally, and "Big Mouth" came around to see Stan.

"Stan, we're going to ban you from the Lodge," said Phil.

"Why?" asked Stan.

"We think you may have had something to do with what happened to our leader, Fiddleford McGucket," said Ernie.

"Who, me? I had nothing to do with it. I swear it," said Stan.

"We don't like or trust you anymore," said Wally. "No more fishing buddies for you."

"Can I still keep the fez?" Stan asked.

"Why do you want that? " asked "Big Mouth."

"I want to wear it all the time," said Stan. "It makes me look like a man of mystery, Mr. Mystery. I've got a cool eye-patch, too. It's for a new enterprise I've dreamed up. This old place is going to become the Mystery Shack, a major tourist attraction."

"Huh," said Stan. "I doubt it."

"Do what you like about the fez," said Ernie. "It doesn't mean you're still a member."

***

Stan's best exhibit, to start out his collection of oddities, was a bunch of wax figures. He found them in a newspaper advertisement, and when the original owner asked too much for them, he simply stole them from the garage where they were stored.

Stan didn't know that the figures had been implanted with nano-chips by Bill Cipher. Bill needed someone to keep an eye on Stan while he traveled; Bill was now ranging further and further from Gravity Falls in his search for Ruth and the journal she had taken. The chips were poor-quality, susceptible to heat damage, and could only be turned on once a month (at night, when the moon was waxing) to save power. Still, they were better than nothing.

***

Stan advertised in the paper for a young assistant. A young Hispanic kid was the first to answer.

"Yo dude, my name's Soos. You want a kid who doesn't want much money and who can keep his mouth shut? That's me."

"Call me Mr. Pines, kid," said Stan. "How old are you, anyway?"

"I''m twelve, Mr. Pines Kid," said Soos.

"Mr. Pines. And where do you live?" Stan asked.

"In town with my Abuelita," said Soos. "That's grandmother, in case you don't know Spanish."

"What about your parents?" asked Stan. "Are they in town?"

"I don't remember anything about them," said Soos. "Hey, maybe I'm, like, an alien robot. Could be, right?"

"Yeah, right kid," said Stan. "I can use someone like you; someone I can take advantage of. Start by mopping up the spilled popsicles over there."

"Ooh, can I eat them?" Soos asked.

***

The grand opening of the Mystery Shack Wax museum included a fair on the grounds near the Shack. One large exhibit at the fair was a tent with a store for historical costumes, connecting to the theme of historical wax figures.

A team of time agents visited the fair on the opening day. The Time Baby was suspicious of the latest evasive reports from Robot 618 and wanted an independent look at what was going on. The agents posed as the Robinsons, a blended family with two boys. They reported nothing unusual about the costume shop or the wax exhibits. Immediately after that, they hopped ahead to the day when the wax figures were re-introduced, along with a new wax figure of Stan. The Robinsons looked just the same as before, but nobody who saw them recognized them; they still didn't find anything unusual.

Stan was pleased with the fair, and planned to do one every year, but cheaper. The costume shop only got one customer, a fat, bald man who wanted a Christopher Columbus suit in a hurry. Stan decided he would leave it out next year.

The Mystery Shack continued, and Stan and Soos added more and more bizarre (fake) exhibits to it. After five years, people lost interest in the wax museum and it was shut down, and sealed up in an old room. This caused the wax-bodied robots great distress, since they could no longer fulfill their role as spies, or even get into the rest of the house to make mischief while Stan slept. They vowed revenge.

***

Bill Cipher was ranging the country, hopelessly looking for the missing journal volume 2. It could be anywhere, but he had to find it.

Bill didn't connect the rise of L'il Gideon, cute kid TV psychic, with the journal. He didn't watch much TV, and even then he might not have recognized the amulet Gideon wore, one of many items of alien technology from level 2 of the Shack basement.

***

Gideon's research in the Journal had led him to realize that the first volume must be in Gravity Falls, Oregon. He knew it was connected to a portal that would open up to unlimited universes, which would give him unlimited power.

Gideon told his parents one morning, "We're moving to Gravity Falls, Oregon."

"Now, why do you want us to do that, sunshine?" asked Bud Gleeful.

"There's something important there Ah detected with mah psychic powers," said Gideon.

"Now honey, you know your powers ain't real. You're just good at readin' people," said Mrs. Gleeful, vacuuming around the living room as she talked.

"You're going to defy mah will?" asked Gideon.

"We're not going to move to Gravity Falls, Gideon," said Mrs. Gleeful. "Not on your whim."

"We are! You just keep on vacuumin' and leave the decisions to me," said Gideon.

His amulet glowed and her mind was under his control. "Just keep on vacuumin'... keep on vacuumin'," his mother repeated.

"How about you, old man?" asked Gideon.

"Ah'll go along with whatever you say, Son," said Bud, trying to sooth him. "But where will we live, dumplin'? How can we keep making money to live on?"

"Ah've been earning a lot with mah show, enough for a down payment on a house," said Gideon. "And Ah can do mah show from a tent there, until we can find a nicer location."

"And what about mah Gleeful's Auto Sales business?" Bud asked.

"You can set that up anywhere," said Gideon.

***

Gideon immediately became a thorn in the side to Stan. His first act of annoyance was to cut Stan off from a parking space, as people nearby cheered and waved papers to be autographed by a star they recognized from television.

Gideon set up the Tent 'O Telepathy in competition with Stan. He built a factory and warehouse not far down Gopher Road from the Mystery Shack. Gideon knew that the Mystery Shack, or its surrounding land, contained Journal 1. His Journal 2 even had pages mapping potential hiding places. If he could drive Stan out, or steal his deed, then he would be free to find the other book.

Worse than that was his attempt at occult magic: he attacked a young man, Robbie Vale, with telekinesis and killed him one night, then raised him as a "zombie" (a human body animated by advanced alien technology) with orders to attack Stan Pines. Robbie instead strolled into the Mystery Shack and tried to chat up Wendy Corduroy, a girl he had a crush on from a young age.

Gideon confronted Robbie, and demanded, "Why didn't you follow my orders?"

"Hey, dork, just because I'm a zombie doesn't mean I'll do what you tell me," said Robbie. "I'm still my own man."

Gideon was furious but he had to give in. Robbie was almost invulnerable, thanks to him. (He would later try bribing Robbie with a mind-controlling music disc, but that was a failure, too.)

***

"Hey Soos," said Grunkle Stan. "My grand niece and nephew are coming for the summer. Fix up the attic as a room for them."

"Yes sir, Mr. Pines," said Soos.

He went up and cleaned up the piles of junk in the room, shifting much of it down to his workshop where he made attractions for the Mystery Shack.

He moved in cots and some other basic furniture. As a final touch, he placed a history book on a box on the side of the room. It had two taped-in sections he had printed himself, one on the ancient Greeks and one on the Mayas.

The Mayan one contained a silly story about a basketball-playing dog he had adapted from "Air Bud." He wasn't sure why he had put that in, but it was funny. The fuzzy brain in this humanoid body did that to him sometimes. At least it was a protection from mind-readers. (As Soos thought about this, his mind wandered to worry about whether hot dogs are made from real dogs. He hoped not.) The Ancient Greek section contained a short account of the life of Domiclese. Soos hoped that Dipper would read it and his memories would be stirred up.

Robot 618 shouldn't get everything his own way. Not when there was a survivor from the opposing side of the Great Robot Wars around to thwart him. He had even kept his own name, in a way. That made it easier to remember: "Soos" sounded just like "Zeus."


	10. The Pine Twins Arrive

Dipper and Mabel Pines found themselves suddenly sent to Gravity Falls, Oregon to stay with relatives.

"You'll love the fresh air," their father, Stanley Jr. Pines told them. "I was out there in my early college days and the countryside is beautiful."

"But... our summer plans..." Dipper said.

"This will be better," said their mother, Edith Pines.

"I bet it will be super cool," said Mabel with her customary optimism. "Woop! Woop!"

"Your great-uncle, Grunkle Stan, owns a small home out there," said their father.

"What's he like?" asked Dipper.

"Your Grunkle Stan is a little... odd," said Edith Pines, "But your Grandpa Stanley and Grandmother Ruth are there, too, so everything should be perfectly fine."

(Stan was fairly proficient at imitating voices, especially his brother's, so it was not surprising he had been able to mislead the Pines when they called.)

***

They were dropped off by the bus at the tour-bus stop right in front of the oddest-looking building they had ever seen. It was a two-story triangular wedge, with another wing off the side. A huge sign with the words "Mystery Hack" was on the roof (the "S" had dropped off). Other tourist-trap signs were scattered everywhere, including many "No Refunds."

There was a puff of smoke and a large gray-haired man with a fez and an eyepath over one side of his glasses jumped out. He waved his cane, which had an eight-ball on it.

"Greetings, tourists!" he shouted. "I'm Mr. Mystery, your guide to the wonders of the Mystery Shack. Prepare to be amazed!"

"Grunkle Stan?" asked Mabel.

"Oh... you're not tourists. You must be Mabel and Dipper, the grand niece and nephew I was expecting. You're right; I'm your Grunkle Stan."

"Hi, Grunkle Stan," said Dipper. "Are our grandparents around?"

Stan said, "Oh, they're away on business. They'll be be back later in the summer. Let me get Soos to show you to your rooms."

Stan was glad he wouldn't have to spend too much time supervising the children. He could put them to work during business hours and let them roam free the rest of the time. After all, robot kids should be able to take care of themselves, right?

***

When they were unpacking in the attic room, after a quick tour of the place by Soos, Dipper said, "Mabel, you didn't bring that worn-out puppet Bear-O with you, did you?"

Mabel laughed. "Of course I did! And I'm going to get Grunkle Stan to let me do puppet shows with him on the stage down there."

She held up Bear-O and began to sing:

"They're quite a pair, Mabel and Bear-O.  
Her unbearlievable beaaaaar!"

"You call him Bear-O the Great. If he's the Great Bear, are you the Little Bear?" Dipper joked.

"I'm the Mama Bear, and he's my Baby Bear," said Mabel.

"And we're both great!" she made Bear-O say.

"You'll scare the kids," Dipper said. "He's old and broken. He's had the stuffing knocked out of him."

"All the more reasons for me to love and protect him," said Mabel. "He has a face only a mother could love."

"I can't beaaar it when you talk about me that way," Mabel made Bear-O say.

Something about this conversation was making Dipper sad. He backed off and let her play with Bear-O as much as she wanted.

Soos came back up the attic stairs with a couple of framed paintings in his arms.

"Yo, dudes, I thought you guys might like these paintings to, like, jazz up your room," Soos said. "Who wants the Mickey Mouse and who wants the ship at sea?"

"No thanks, Soos," said Mabel. "I have my own posters and art."

"I'd like the ship at sea," said Dipper. "I was named for a pirate character, though I prefer my nickname."

"Dude, I was hoping you would say that. I'll keep the Mickey for me," said Soos. He walked away with it, singing, "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-U... I forget how to spell the rest."

Soos nodded to himself as he left. He was sure Dipper would take the picture of the ship. The circuits he had built into the frame would be useful someday.

***

Bill was at the end of his wits. The android twins had arrived and he still didn't have the missing two journals to get the portal ready. He had to keep looking, but he came back to Gravity Falls just long enough to implant a control program into Gompers, a local goat that grazed around the Mystery Shack.

"Your mission will be to gather more symbols for the dream projector ring. Get symbols for the twins, of course. Then people around Stan Pines, or who come to the Mystery Shack often, will be best. Send the channel settings back in time to when I first contacted McGucket, in a batch, once you have a full ring."

The goat bleated, and Bill understood the answer as, "Affirmative."

"And if you see any old books with brass bindings and burgundy covers, please try to get them or at least keep track of who has them. Keep an eye on any person who finds a book and try to protect them until I get back," said Bill.

The goat bleated, "Burgundy."


	11. Journal Three

Gompers the goat moved up the stairs under the command of the program Bill had implanted.

"Maximum stealth mode; make no sound. Try to blend in to the background. Jump up onto the bed for a good vantage point," its control program silently directed.

"This attic is amazing. Check out all my splinters!" said Mabel.

She finished up hanging all her posters. Dipper had already hung up his new ship picture and was busy unpacking other stuff. He only looked up to see his sister's splinter-filled hands.

"And there's a goat on my bed," said Dipper.

The program directed, "Light brown hat with a stubby brown star on it. Snap it. Stubby Star is on the Ring."

Mabel moved closer and put out a hand. "Hey, friend."

"Get the sweater in your mouth to bring the symbol-wearer closer," directed the program.

"Oh! Yes, you can keep chewing on my sweater," said Mabel with a laugh.

"Magenta sweater with a shooting star with a rainbow tail. Snap it. Shooting Star is on the Ring. Twin stars for twin subjects, good symbols," directed the program. "Storing for later transmission when the Ring is full."

***

During the first week, Stan put the kids to work cleaning the gift shop. Mabel was curious and wanted to touch everything, but he soon put a stop to that.

"Don't touch the merchandise!" Stan snapped.

Mabel also flirted with all the boy customers, but he didn't mind that so much because kids in the store were annoying. He made her clean up the mess when she pushed over a card rack while trying to give one boy a playful shove.

"She's a strong little robot," he thought. "But kinda cute and funny, too."

***

The first weekend he suggested a family bonding art project. Stan wanted to test if the robots had uncanny artistic abilities. Could they copy money in fine detail? Not very well, as it turned out, but almost passable.

They were working in a cinder-block-lined room in the basement. There were steps down to it from the ground floor, but it didn't connect to the other part of the first-level basement, with the elevator to the tech and portal rooms. He thought it was secure, but there was a window and somebody must have spied in. Gideon, Stan was almost certain when he thought it over later.

Police lights flashed as Sheriff Blubbs and Deputy Durland arrived.

"We have a report of counterfeitin' in progress," said Blubbs.

"Come out of there quietly or we'll come in swingin' our nightsticks," said Durland.

They were carted off to the county jail. The officers confiscated all of their possessions for the night.

"Lookie here, Durland," said the Sheriff. "The kids have fancy computer phones."

"Oooh, can't let them have those in the cell," said the Deputy. "They might compute up an escape."

"Cell phone don't work well here, anyway," said Dipper. "There's hardly any reception. They don't get the internet and the only people we can call or text are each other."

"Ain't that just too bad," said the Sheriff, giggling to himself.

"Who knows what those crazy computer words mean, anyway?" Stan thought. He only knew good-old-days technology and a bit of advanced alien technology, not this modern junk.

Mabel complained of the cold in the cells. Stan almost felt guilty for dragging the robot kids into this. All right, admit it. He did feel guilty. They really were just like kids.

In the morning they were brought before a judge.

"Your honor, it was a family art project," said Stan. "We didn't try to pass off any of our work as money. Just look at it: it's not good enough to be real counterfeit, anyway. See that Benjamin Franklin? It looks like a woman."

The judge looked over the evidence and said, "Case dismissed. But don't do it again. I don't want to see any semi-realistic-looking-money 'art' projects from you any more."

***

Soos watched the kids in the store as they had a small argument over Mabel's flirting.

"Mabel, I know you're going through your whole 'Boy Crazy' phase, but I think you're kind of overdoing it with the 'crazy' part. "

"Come on, Dipper! This is our first summer away from home. It's my big chance to have an epic summer romance."

"Yeah, but do you need to flirt with every guy you meet?"

"Mock all you want, brother, but I've got a good feeling about this summer. I wouldn't be surprised if the man of my dreams walked through that door right now."

Enter Stan, belching. Under his arm were three wooden signs that Soos had made earlier that day: an "Enter" sign pointing left and two other signs pointing right.

"Oh, why?" said Mabel, disappointed it wasn't her dream man.

Dipper laughed.

"All right, all right, look alive people. I need someone to hang up these signs in the spooky part of the forest," said Stan.

Dipper, Mabel, and Soos all said, "Not it."

"Nobody asked you, Soos," said Stan.

"I know, and I'm comfortable with that," said Soos.

He ate a chocolate bar while Wendy lazily rejected the job from across the room.

Soos looked at the signs in Stan's arms. There was something wrong... He had located the tree which opened the hatch to the Journal 3 hiding place on an earlier sign-posting errand, but of course he had done nothing about it. Zeus didn't want to do 618 any favors. But if Domiclese found the Journal, he wouldn't show it to Stan...

That was it. The woods were already full of signs. If Dipper posted two more left-pointing signs, there was a natural progression of posting trees that would lead him to the hiding spot. But there was only one left-pointing sign and two right-pointing ones...

"That says "BEWARB," said Stan.

Soos saw this was correct; he must have spelled it wrong when he wrote with bug-attracting solution on Dipper's arm when Dipper was asleep.

"Look, kid. The whole 'monsters in the forest' thing is just local legend, trumped up by guys like me to sell merch to guys like that," said Stan.

Stan pointed to a fat customer laughing at a Stan bobble-head.

Soos was wearing his tool belt, and on it was his measuring tape. His measuring tape time-machine, to be exact. It was time to correct his mistake. He stepped out of the room and snapped back an hour and a half. He replaced his previous self for the duration of the jump, allowing a do-over.

"Oh, there you are, Soos," said the Stan of an hour-and-a-half ago. "I need you to paint up three more signs for the woods."

"Yes sir, Mr. Pines," said Soos.

This time Soos made two left-pointing signs and one right-pointing sign, the "Enter" sign. Back to the new future he went.

"So quit being so paranoid!" said Stan. He dropped the signs into Dipper's arms and now they were in the correct orientation.

Soos wasn't worried about a paradox-correcting reaction in this case. The outcome he wanted to affect was in the future, Dipper finding the Journal. It wasn't overlapped by the jump. The part he changed, the direction of the signs, was completely under his control.

***

Gompers smelled something odd about the signs Dipper was carrying (a slight whiff of tachyons, according to the control program in him). He followed Dipper at a distance to the woods where the signs were to be posted.

When Dipper activated the control that revealed Journal 3, Gompers was right there. His goat reflexes made him jump back at the sudden movement of the trapdoor.

Dipper dusted off the book and started to read it. Gompers tried to get it from him, but when that didn't work he recorded Dipper as the book holder, to be monitored and protected.

***

Things happened a little too fast for Gompers a few days later, when Mabel was kidnapped by the gnome colony and Dipper went after her. Fortunately they rescued themselves.

One gnome was left trapped in the plastic rings from a soda six-pack. The control program directed Gompers to carry him off. When they were unobserved, the program spoke to the gnome in goat bleats (gnomes can speak to animals).

"You have angered my master," said Gompers. "You will never harm that boy or kidnap his sister again. If you do, my master will inflict nightmares on you all."

"W-what if she comes back to us of her own free will?" asked the gnome.

"She must consent without coercion," Gompers said. "In that very unlikely event, you may have her. But you must bring her back when my master requires, for the ceremony."

"How long?" asked the gnome.

"A month or two," said the goat.

The gnome made some quick calculations. "A thousand of us, at a hundred a day... that gives us each at least three times. It's a deal."

"Only with her free consent," the goat said. "Otherwise, you must let her go, if she ever falls into your hands again."

***

The original "Stubby Star" hat was replaced by Dipper with a "Pine Tree" hat; Gompers was soon able to capture that image for the Ring.

And Dipper, with the help of Journal 3, was going to learn a lot more about Gravity Falls than Bill had intended. That pleased Soos.


	12. Gobblewonker

Stan told Soos at closing time, "Tomorrow I'm shutting up the Mystery Shack for the day. I'm taking the kids fishing at Gravity Falls Lake. This family bonding session will be much better than the last one."

"Yes sir, Mr. Pines. I'm sure a day with you on the lake will be much better than making counterfeit money and spending a night in jail," said Soos.

Privately, Soos wasn't sure of this. He had floating eyes spying on Old Man McGucket, who seemed to be gathering materials for a big project. Anyone could predict that Stan might take the kids fishing on the first day of the season, so it might be aimed at them.

With a head-full of decades of memories mixed with nightmares implanted by Bill, McGucket could be a harmless kook or a deadly enemy. Right now, he seemed to Soos to be the latter.

Soos planned to go out on the lake himself, in a power boat, to watch out for the kids. He spent a little more time-travel to get the boat, making sure it was fully equipped and ready to go.

***

At the lake, the kids took off their blindfolds and looked around. It seemed like the whole town was at Gravity Falls Lake. Lazy Susan tried to coax a fish to jump into a frying pan. Manly Dan was beating up a fish with his bare hands for his boys, which Stan declared to be quality family bonding.

Soos was already out on the lake in his boat, listening to them with his enhanced hearing.

Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan, why do you wanna bond with us all of a sudden?"

Stan explained that he wanted fishing buddies, since the guys from from the Lodge didn't 'like' or 'trust' him. (He put in the air quotes).

"I think he actually wants to fish with us," said Mabel.

Stan said, "Hey, I know what'll cheer you sad sacks up! Pow! Pines family fishing hats! That's hand stitching, you know. It's just gonna be you, me and those goofy hats on a boat for ten hours!"

The Dipper hat said "Dippy" and the Mabel hat had the "L" almost falling off.

"Ten hours?" said Dipper.

"I brought the joke book!" said Stan, and produced a copy of "1001 Yuk'em Ups, Uncle Approved."

Dipper said, "No! No!"

Mabel said, "There has to be a way out of this!"

Old Man McGucket crashed into the scene, and said, "I seen it! I seen it again! The Gravity Falls Gobblewonker! Come quick before it scrapdoodles away!"

He began dancing around.

Mabel said, "Aw, he's doing a happy jig!"

"No! It's a jig of grave danger!" said McGucket.

McGucket's son Achilles the lake ranger, berated his father for scaring the customers and spayed him with a water bottle, but McGucket insisted he had seen something and for proof he showed his smashed-up boat.

"Behold! It's the Gobble-dy-wonker what done did it! It had a long neck like a gee-raffe! And wrinkly skin like...like this gentleman right here!"

Stan said, "Huh?"

"It chawed my boat up to smitheroons, and shim-shammed over to Scuttlebutt Island! Ya gotta believe me!" said McGucket.

Sheriff Blubs got everyone laughing at the "crazy old man," except Achilles, who just shook his head.

McGucket retreated, saying, "Aww, donkey spittle! Banjo polish!"

Stan was ready to take them out on the lake in his rowboat, the Stanowar, but Dipper and Mabel had caught monster-hunting fever.

Dipper said, "...If we can snag a photo of it, we can split the prize fifty-fifty!"

Mabel gasped, "That's two fifties!"

"Imagine what you could do with five hundred dollars!" said Dipper.

Mabel stared into space, fantasizing about a human-sized hamster ball she had seem advertised in a local newspaper that morning. It stirred up memories deep inside her, and she wanted one desperately.

"Mabel! Mabel?" Dipper called, snapping his fingers near her ear.

Mabel said, "Dipper, I am one million percent on board with this!"

Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan! Change of plans. We're taking that boat to Scuttlebutt Island, and we are gonna find that Gobblewonker!"

Dipper and Mabel both started chanting, "Monster hunt! Monster hunt!"

Soos began to bring his boat, the S.S. Cool Dude, closer to the docks.

"Monster hunt!..." said McGucket, coming nearer to the kids.

Soos wondered what McGucket meant. If the old man was behind the Gobblewonker, he couldn't very well hunt it. But the odd gleam in his eye as he looked at the "robot kids" made Soos realize that they were the "monsters" McGucket intended to hunt.

Soos brought his boat even closer and looked McGucket in the eyes.

McGucket let his chant trail off. "Monster... Eh... I'll go."

Soos pulled up to the dock with his boat, saying, "You dudes say somethin' about a monster hunt?"

Soos easily persuaded them to use his boat to go on a hunt, instead of going fishing with Stan. (His robot walk helped, and this was easy for him because his real body was a robot).

If McGucket had stirred up a monster, or built one with alien technology, they were safest going to find it (with a power boat to escape in) rather than being sitting ducks out on the lake in a rowboat with Stan.

Mabel said, "We made the right choice!"

"Yes!" said Soos.

***

After a quick stop at the fishing shop for sunscreen, they were on their way. There was a discussion about the disposable cameras, and they ended up losing several of them overboard. There was a discussion about who would be captain, ending with Dipper as Captain, Mabel as Co-captain, and Soos as Associate Co-captain.

"Well, as first co-captain, our number one order of business is to lure the monster out with this," said Dipper, pointing to a barrel labeled "Fish Food."

"Permission to taste some?" asked Soos, overcome by silliness.

"Permission granted," said Dipper.

"Permission co-granted," said Mabel.

"Permission associate co-granted," said Soos.

He grabbed a piece of chum from the barrel and put it in his mouth, then gagged and spit over the side. He rubbed his tongue, trying to get the taste off.

"Dude, I don't know what I expected that to taste like," said Soos.

***

The boat drifted through the fog toward the island. Mabel was at the prow, playing ventriloquist with a pelican.

"Aren't you supposed to be doing lookout?" said Dipper.

"Look out!" Mabel said. She kicked a soccer ball in his direction, hitting him in the arm.

The boat ran aground on the beach.

"We're here. I'm a lookout genius" said Mabel. She jumped off the boat. "Hamster ball, here we come!"

The others jumped out and they began walking along the mist-covered trail. They came to a sign saying "Scuttlebutt Island."

Soos covered the first part with his arm. "Dude, check it out. Butt Island."

"You rapscallion," said Mabel with a big grin.

Dipper didn't laugh. Mabel teased Dipper, asking if he was scared. While she was fooling around, they heard a strange noise.

"Was that your stomach?" she asked Soos.

"No, mine usually makes whale noises," said Soos,

Mabel listened to his stomach and said, "Wow, so majestic!"

While they were distracted, a possum ran off with their lantern.

"I can't see anything," Dipper complained.

Soos said, "Dudes, maybe this isn't worth it."

"Not worth is?" said Dipper. "Imagine what would happen if we got that picture."

Both Dipper and Mabel went into their fantasies.

"I'm in!" said Dipper, returning from a fantasy of fame and glory.

"Me too!" said Mabel, returning from her own fantasy of the hamster ball.

They set off toward the other end of the island. Soos followed.

Mabel was making up a silly rap song about things that rhyme with Mabel when they heard a strange noise and a flock of birds took off into the sky.

"This is it," said Dipper.

They walked until they saw a mist-shrouded outline that looked like the sea monster ahead,

"Get your cameras ready," said Dipper,

When they ran closer it turned out to be a bunch of old barrels with a clan of beavers chewing on it.

"What was that noise, then? I heard a monster noise," said Dipper.

They looked over and saw one of the beavers was playing with an old chainsaw, which was making a growling noise.

"Maybe that old guy was crazy after all," said Dipper.

"He did use the word 'scrapdoodle'," said Mabel.

Soos had fun taking pictures of the beavers, but the kids were disappointed.

"What are we going to say to Grunkle Stan?" asked Dipper. "We ditched him over nothing."

Then they heard a splash, and a huge shape headed their way.

"This is it," said Dipper as the others backed away. "It's not that hard. Just point and shoot."

"Graaaagh!" growled the Gobblewonker, snapping at him.

"Run!" shouted Soos.

The Gobblewonker gave chase, and Dipper and Mabel would have been caught in its jaws if it weren't for the Olympian strength of Soos, who picked them both up and ran. They rushed down the trail, with the sea serpent slithering behind them and pushing trees out of its way as it went.

They jumped back into the boat. Soos got it going, but the monster still pursued them. Dipper tried to take a picture, but the lens in his camera was cracked. Soos used most of the rest of the cameras to throw at the monster, and broke the one he threw to Dipper.

***

They were chased all over the lake. When they crashed through the beaver barrels, the boat became full of the animals, chewing on everything they could. One grabbed Soos by the face. Dipper got busy pulling off beavers and throwing them back into the water while Mabel steered. When they finally got all the beavers clear, they were headed for the Gravity Falls waterfall and it looked like they were going to be cornered by the monster.

Dipper pulled out his Journal with the number "3" on the cover. "Head for the waterfall! There might be a cave under it."

"Might be?" asked Mabel.

They drove under the waterfall and into the hidden cave. The boat ran aground. The Gobblewonker tried to follow them, but it got stuck in the hole.

Dipper pulled out his last camera from under his hat and took picture after picture. Then the Gobblewonker's struggles knocked down a stalactite, which hit its head with a loud clank.

Dipper approached the beast and rapped on its side.

They climbed up to the top and opened a hatch. Old Man McGucket was inside, furiously operating levers to try to get his robot going again.

He turned and saw them looking at him. "Oh, banjo polish!"

"You... you made this?" asked Dipper.

McGucket told his story, and it turned out he had built giant robots before when he had grievances with people. He tried to explain the advanced technology he used.

"Okay, yeah. But why did you do it?" asked Mabel.

"Well, when you get to be an old fella like me, nobody pays any attention to you anymore. My own son hasn't visited me in months! So I figured maybe I'd catch his fancy with a fifteen ton aquatic robot! In retrospect, it seems a bit contrived. You just don't know the length us old-timers go through for a little quality time with our family."

(Soos thought it was indeed a contrived story. It had been far too deadly a chase just to attract the attention of Achilles. The man had been out to kill them. Soos chose not to press the point; they had escaped alive, and there was no point in riling the madman up when he still had maniacal strength).

Mabel and Dipper looked guilty. They pulled out fishing hats with sewed-on lettering reading "Dippy" and "Mabe-l".

"Dude, I guess the real lake monster is, like, you two. Sorry, it just, like, popped into my head there," said Soos.

"We still have one roll of film," said Mabel.

"What do you want to do with it?" asked Dipper.

***

They got the damaged boat of of the cave with some difficulty, and found Stan Pines out on the water alone.

"I thought you guys were off playing spin-the-bottle with Soos," said Stan.

"We spent all day trying to find a legendary dinosaur," said Dipper.

"But the only dinosaur we really want to hang out with is you," said Mabel.

"Save your sympathy," said Stan. "I've been making friends. I even had a run-in with the lake police. I have to wear this ankle bracelet now, so that will be fun."

They joined Stan in the boat and spent the rest of the day in his company. Soos kept an eye out for the death ray McGucket was working on next, but it didn't materialize in time to interfere with their day.


	13. Llamas and Lebam

Soos made a mistake when he opened up the room with the wax figures. He only wanted to stir things up, but he was not aware that the figures came to life as Bill's spys, or that they had developed murderous ideas of revenge. Their release put kids in danger. Fortunately their android reflexes were up to the challenge of dueling the wax robots with hot implements. The Sherlock Holmes figure only thought he was as smart as the original detective; his failure to decapitate the real Stan proved that. Dipper easily tricked him outside into the hot sun and melted him.

Mabel thought she had destroyed all the other figures, at least she was "99 percent sure." But the wax head of Larry King remained to spy on them from the ventilation ducts. A rat ran off with one of his ears, but even this was to his advantage. The nanobots transferred into the rat when it ate the ear, giving Larry a second body that was less susceptible to melting.

On the afternoon of the day they defeated the wax figures, Mabel held up sweaters in the mirror, trying to decide which ones to wear next day.

"Hmm. Hey Dipper, which do you think is better? Sequins or llama hair?" Mabel asked.

Larry watched silently from the ventilation duct. Dipper was reading and not paying attention at first, but she finally attracted his attention; he recommended the purple one with sequins over the llama-hair one with a picture of a llama on it.

***

That evening, the kids and Soos paid a visit to L'il Gideon's Tent 'O Telepathy (against Stan's wishes) after seeing one of his advertisements and getting "all curiousy."

Gideon put on quite a show, but almost everything could be explained as common sense rather than telepathy.

At the end of the show, Dipper said, "Man, that kid's an even bigger fraud then Stan! I wonder why our uncle's jealous."

"Oh, come on. His dance moves were adorable! And did you see his hair? It was like, whoosh!" said Mabel.

"You're too easily impressed," said Dipper.

"Yeah, yeah," said Mabel.

She didn't know that Gideon was listening and becoming interested in her.

***

Gideon came for a visit the next day.

Mabel answered the door wearing the purple, sequined sweater she had picked out.

"...Now, I know we haven't formally met, but after yesterday's performance, I just couldn't get your laugh out of my head," Gideon said.

He charmed and flattered her, and she agreed to come over to his house for a makeover in his dressing room.

Mabel came back from the session with her hair and nails done, very happy with Gideon. She showed the results to Dipper, who said it made her look like a wolverine.

"I know, right? Raah! I was hanging out with my new pal, Gideon. He is one dapper little man," said Mabel.

Dipper said, "Mabel, I don't trust anyone who's hair is bigger than their head."

"Oh, leave him alone! You never want to do girly stuff with me; you and Soos get to do boy stuff all the time!" said Mabel.

Then Dipper was distracted by Soos, who wanted to blow up hot dogs in the microwave, one by one.

After removing the excess makeup at home, Mabel went out with Gideon again and they sat on the roof of his warehouse.

***

Gompers the goat was out monitoring Mabel, and he caught sight of Gideon embracing her.

Gideon said, "Mabel Pines, you have made me the happiest boy in the world."

Gompers saw that Gideon was clipping a bit of Mabel's hair and saving it in a small jar.

"Are you sniffing my hair?" Mabel asked.

The control program in Gompers thought that was exactly the point, that Gideon was keeping something to sniff as he fantasized about Mabel.

"Humans do that sort of thing," the program thought. "Too bad he doesn't know about cloning or he could have his own private copy of her."

This gave the program an idea. For the ceremony, it would be ideal for the Ring to have three male/female couples and four singles. Why not create a clone of Mabel to pair with Gideon, and add them both to the Ring?

The only problem was that Mabel wasn't wearing natural fiber. If she were, it would be easy to make a clone with a nice set of extra abilities. It reviewed the transmissions the Wax Larry King head had sent... yes, there was a way.

The control program sent instructions to itself, using a backwards time channel. A few days back, Gompers moved outside the window of the room where the wax figures where stored. Gompers transmitted new instructions to the Larry King wax figure.

***

"Hmm. Hey Dipper, which do you think is better? Sequins or llama hair?" Mabel asked.

"The llama hair. Llamas are nature's greatest warriors," said Wax Larry King.

"Thanks Dipper!" said Mabel.

Dipper looked up from his reading, not sure what just happened.

***

This time, when Mabel sat with Gideon on the warehouse roof, she was wearing the tan llama-hair sweater with the picture of a brown llama facing right.

Gompers sent a tiny cloaked robot drone up near the two. It ensured that Gideon's jar got not only Mabel's hair, but also llama hair fibers from the sweater.

It also put in miniaturized cloning technology, keyed to activate on a verbal command.

Control nanobots were added as well, keyed to Gideon as the clone's master. Her body would have to obey his verbal orders, whether she liked it or not. That should make Gideon very happy.

The nanobots also carried a copy of Mabel's memories up to the point where the hair sample was taken. She would come to life thinking of herself as Mabel, but she would very soon have to adjust to life as Gideon's slave.

The llama-hair sample would give the clone some of the nature of a llama, including the ability to digest grass, leaves, and paper. It would also allow her to generate a copy of any clothing Mabel was wearing. The clothing would be made from llama hair, but there was a mental illusion projector built into her subconscious that would make the illusion of identical clothing perfect. The only flaw was that there was one illusion for her clothing whether she was observed directly or seen in a mirror. Because of this, any pattern on her clothing would not be reversed in the mirror.

This clothing trick was an extra feature for the pleasure of her master, Gideon. The control program would leave it as a nice surprise for him, that his slave girl could be forced to dress up in the outfits of the girl of his dreams just by having her say the name "Mabel."

***

That night, Gideon was visited by a projected dream, teaching him a "spell" to create a mirror doppelganger of Mabel. It was easy to mislead him this way, because his dreams and memories seemed to be full of the idea of working magic. (The Gompers program didn't check too deeply into the reason for these other dreams, so it missed the fact that Gideon had Journal 2.)

In the morning, Gideon went to his dressing room with the hair sample to give the spell a try. Standing to the side of the full-length mirror that had recently reflected Mabel's image, he got out the fibers. He pressed them to the mirror and chanted, "Speculum gemini, speculum gemini."

The fibers stuck to the mirror, where they grew and expanded into a complete clone of Mabel in her llama sweater, with the llama facing the other way. The clone stumbled into the room.

"Gideon? What's going on? Last thing I remember, we were sitting on top of your warehouse. Now we're back in your makeover room. I don't have time for any more makeovers today..."

"You're not who you think you are," said Gideon. "You're the mirror doppelganger of my darlin' Mabel. I think I'll call you Lebam, which is Mabel spelled backwards."

"You're such a kidder," said Lebam.

She moved in to give him a hard playful punch on the shoulder, but he touched the gem on his bolo tie with his right hand. The gem glowed green and her left hand was caught in a field of magic.

"Don't touch me without permission," said Gideon.

"What are you doing?" said Lebam.

"Magic. With this amulet I can make things move," said Gideon. He released her hand from his telekinetic grip.

"That's so awesome," said Lebam. "May I try it?"

"No. I don't want you turnin' its power against me," said Gideon. "Besides, it's breakable. If it hit something hard it would shatter, and I can never make another one."

"All right, just asking," said Lebam. "I need to go home now."

"You can't. I have something for you to do," said Gideon.

"Like what?" said Lebam.

"We're going downtown, and we'll take some photographs and do an interview for my self-published fan magazine," said Gideon.

"Why?" asked Lebam.

"If I build up people's expectations of romance between Mabel and myself, she'll find it much harder to say no to another date, and another, and another, and eventually my proposal of marriage," said Gideon.

"Marriage? You can't get me to marry you. I don't like you that much. I'm starting not to like you at all," said Lebam.

"The real Mabel is falling for me, I know it. You're her mirror opposite, so naturally you hate what she loves," said Gideon.

"Don't be silly. I'm the real me," said Lebam.

"Look at yourself in the mirror," said Gideon.

Lebam looked, and said, "I don't see anything different. What am I supposed to see?"

"Look at your sweater, and look in the mirror again," said Gideon.

Lebam looked. The mirror-reflected llama faced left, and so did the one on her sweater. "That's weird, these clothes don't reverse in the mirror."

"My dream said that's how it would work. Since you're already a mirror reflection, the mirror doesn't reverse you. At least you have a reflection. That's good, or you might not show up in photographs," said Gideon.

Lebam looked behind the mirror, expecting a projector or some other trick. She saw nothing unusual.

"This is... this is real, isn't it? I'm not me. That means I've got nobody – no home, no friends, no Grunkle Stan, no Dipper..." said Lebam.

"Nobody but li'l ol' me," said Gideon in a sinister whisper.

"What have you done?" asked Lebam, getting angry. "You have to send me back to the mirror world where I belong."

"Do the magazine interview for me, and we'll see," said Gideon.

"Do it now," said Lebam. Like one of nature's greatest warriors, she lowered her head and charged him.

"Stop!" said Gideon.

Lebam froze in her tracks. It wasn't like the green glow that held her before. This time, her muscles simply wouldn't obey her, no matter how much she struggled to move.

"I forgot to mention that the amulet gives me a li'l bit of mind-control, too," said Gideon. "Since I summoned you, I can control your actions completely."

Lebam stopped fighting, hoping that she could get away later.

"All right, I'll do the interview, but I won't lie for you," said Lebam.

"Just smile and let me do all the talking. And here, wear this sweater," said Gideon.

Gideon pulled a plain light-blue sweater in her size off one of the hangers and tossed it to her.

"Plain? I don't do plain," said Lebam.

"You can't be seen in the llama-hair one since it's backwards from hers and people might remember. And besides, this one won't clash with my suit," said Gideon.

Lebam put the sweater on and went downtown with Gideon. She got her picture taken with him for the Gravity Falls Gossiper by Toby Determined, and she did the interview, smiling and nodding and hating it. Gideon ordered a mass printing of his new fan magazine, 'Gideon & Mabel', to be distributed all over town for free.

Gompers was there on the street as well. His program scanned beneath the plain sweater to the one with the llama symbol, reserved from Mabel's sweater. Click: Llama was on the Ring. A click on Gideon's cape with its eye-in-a-pentagram logo added the All-Seeing Pentagram to the Ring as well.

***

Mabel came dragging in from her first dinner date with Gideon. A crowd had gathered around when he asked her for a second date, virtually forcing her to agree. Why were all these people interfering with her life?

Dipper asked, "Hey. How'd it go?"

"I don't know...I have a lobster now," said Mabel, putting the lobster in the Fiji Mermaid tank.

Dipper said, "Well, at least it's over and you'll never have to go out with him again. Mabel? It's over, right? Mabel?"

"BLAARRGG!" yelled Mabel, flapping her arms. "He asked me out again and I didn't know how to say no."

Dipper said, "Like this." He mouthed the word "NO."

Mabel said, "It's not that easy, Dipper! And I do like Gideon, as a friend/little sister. So I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I just need to get things back to where they used to be. You know, friends."

***

On the second date, Mabel was out on a boat with Gideon on the romantic moonlit lake, with Old Man McGucket as their gondolier.

"Boat in the night! Boat in the night!" said McGucket with a wacky laugh.

McGucket wasn't in quite as dangerous a mood this evening as he was the opening day of fishing season, but he did seem to enjoy seeing her squirm.

"Hah, you know I thought dancing was gonna be the end of the evening, right?" asked Mabel.

Gideon said, "Don't you want this evenin' to last, my sweet?"

Mabel said, "No! I mean yes. I mean I'm always happy to hang out with a friend, buddy, pal, chum, other word for friend..."

McGucket said, "Pal?"

Mabel said, "I already said pal, uh, mate?"

Gideon said, "How about soulmate?"

Fireworks flashed into the sky, showing the name "Mabel" within a heart.

"Well, you can't say no to that," said McGucket.

***

Mabel paced the living room. "..I mean, he's so nice, but.. I can't keep doing this," Mabel said. "But I can't break his heart. Ahh! I have no way out!"

Dipper walked in. "What in the heck happened on that date?"

"I don't know. I was in the friend zone, and then before I knew what was happening, he pulled me into the romance zone," said Mabel. "It was like quick sand! Chubby quicksand!"

"Mabel, come on. It's not like you're gonna have to marry Gideon," said Dipper.

Stan walked in. "Great news, Mabel. You have to marry Gideon!"

"WHAT!?" said Mabel.

Stan said, "It's all part of my long term deal with Buddy Gleeful. There's a lot of cash tied up in this thing. Plus I got this shirt."

He showed them his "Team Gideon" shirt. "Ughh, I am fat."

Mabel screamed and ran out of the room.

Stan said, "Bodies change honey. Bodies change..."

Dipper walked in to their attic room and found Mabel hiding in her sweater. "Oh no. Mabel."

"Mabel's not here. She's in sweater town."

"Are you gonna come out of sweater town?"

Mabel whimpered and shook her head.

"All right, enough is enough. If you can't break up with Gideon, I'll do it for you."

"You will?" asked Mabel, coming back out of her sweater.

Dipper nodded.

Mabel said, "Oh thank you thank you thank you!"

Dipper laughed and said, "All right."

Mabel hugged him.

***

The next evening, Mabel was sitting on the porch alone, chewing her hair. Dipper had gone off somewhere without telling anyone where or why.

Wendy came up to her. "How's that hair tastin', buddy?"

Mabel said, "Wendy, I need some advice. You've broken up with guys, right?"

Wendy said, "Oh yeah: Russ Durham, Eli Hall, Stoney Davidson..." and kept on listing names, not really listening to Mabel.

"I don't know what's wrong with me. I thought everything was back to normal, but I still feel all gross," said Mabel. "Maybe letting Dipper do it for me was a mistake. Gideon deserves an honest break up. I know what I've gotta do. Thanks for talking to me, Wendy."

Mabel walked around the house to get to the stairs to her room. She muttered to herself, "It's too late to go to Gideon's house tonight. I'll break up with him in person tomorrow."

She didn't hear someone ride away quickly on her bike, wearing her helmet. Someone who looked exactly like her.

***

Later, Mabel was still in her room waiting for Dipper to come back when she got a text message from his phone: "Stay away from Gideon. I saved ur bro's life from him 2nite. U can get the credit."

Mabel texted back, "Is this a joke Dip?"

The other person texted, "I'm Lebam ur mirror double. Come out when I put ur bike away and take my place."


	14. Sharing a Life

Once Dipper was safely home and everyone was asleep, Mabel came out to talk to Lebam, who was hiding in the woods.

"So, who are you really? How come you look like me?" Mabel asked.

"You didn't know that Gideon was a dark wizard, did you?" asked Lebam. "I'm your mirror doppelganger. He pulled me out of a mirror world, I think. I started out thinking I was you; I have all your memories up to where Gideon and I... I mean Gideon and you, were sitting on his warehouse roof and you had just agreed to a date."

"What's your name?" asked Mabel.

"It should be Mabel Pines, but Gideon called me Lebam Senip. I'll go along with that," said Lebam.

"What's been going on between you and Gideon?" Mabel asked.

"Nothing, fortunately," said Lebam with a shudder. "He had me locked in his warehouse. He can magically force me to obey his commands, too, but he wanted to save himself for you. I was just 'backup'. But tonight he was going to take me, after he killed Dipper. So I escaped."

"He was really going to kill Dipper?" asked Mabel. "What a creepozoid."

"Yes," said Lebam. "He lured Dipper out with a fake message from Toby Determined, saying Toby wanted to interview him for the paper. Gideon told me all about it; he was even going to use me somehow to make Dipper's dying moments worse."

"How did you get away?" asked Mabel.

"I can pick locks with hairpins, just like you," said Lebam. "Once I got away I headed to the house, hoping to catch Dipper along the way and warn him. But I missed him, so I borrowed your bike and rode back to the warehouse. I was just in time to save Dipper."

Lebam described how she had tricked Gideon into believing she still wanted to be makeover buddies, grabbed his amulet, thrown the amulet to Dipper, saved both of them from a deadly fall, and then destroyed the amulet.

"This is so cool," Mabel said. "You're like the identical sister I never had but I sometimes wished Dipper had been. Thank you for saving him."

"You're welcome," said Lebam.

Mabel gave Lebam a big hug.

"What will you do now?" Mabel asked. "Go back to the mirror world?"

"I don't know how to go back," Lebam said. "I guess I'll have to go away somewhere and try to start a new life."

"Stay here with us," said Mabel. "You can share my life. We'll swap places and fool everyone. It'll be super duper fun."

"I love super duper fun. But only if you can keep me a secret," said Lebam. "If not, Gideon will try to get me again, or your Grunkle Stan will want to use me for a sideshow."

"You got it, twin sister," said Mabel.

Lebam said, "I'd like to have a place to sleep inside. There's a wolf that prowls the yard at night."

"You saw it?" asked Mabel.

"I smell it," said Lebam. "Can't you? It marked its territory on the totem pole."

"I can't smell anything," said Mabel. "Your sense of smell must be keener than mine."

"It probably comes of being part llama," said Lebam.

You're part llama? Cool! I wish I could be part llama, too," said Mabel.

"It has its points," said Lebam. "Anyway, what about that storage closet in the attic, right near the top of the stairs? I could sleep in there."

"I'll share some of my blankets with you," said Mabel.

"Don't worry about it. My copy of your memories tells me there are a bunch of coats on hangers in there. I can take some down and sleep on them," said Lebam.

"Tomorrow we can start trading places," said Mabel.

"I'll need a little time to practice before I trust myself with fooling Dipper," said Lebam.

"What's to practice? You're just like me," said Mabel.

"Not quite. Are you right handed?" asked Lebam.

"Yes, I'm right-handed," said Mabel. "I throw really well with my right, but when I throw with my left I usually miss."

"I'm left-handed," said Lebam. "I tossed Gideon's bolo tie to Dipper with my left hand tonight, but I think he was too much in shock to notice."

They sneaked inside and got Lebam bedded down in the closet for the night.

***

Lebam lay low and slept most of the next day, recovering from her ordeal as Gideon's prisoner.

Gompers went up on the roof in the morning, looking for a symbol to associate with Wendy. He found her private break area with a cooler, a place she visited every working day. He nosed the cooler box open, and found an empty ice bag floating in half-melted ice. Click. "Ice" was a new symbol on the Ring for Wendy.

Later, when Robbie came over, Gompers saw a heart symbol on Robbie's dark hoodie. Click. Now there was a symbol for Robbie, the "Stitched Heart." Another couple complete.

Mabel, Dipper, Wendy, and her teen friends staged a raid on the "Dusk 2 Dawn" convenience store that evening, which would have ended their lives except for Dipper and his "Lamby Lamby Dance." (His shepherding memories as Domiclese had leaked through into a love for lambs in his childhood. This lead his mother to create a lamb costume for him and to teach him a song and dance routine about lambs and grazing.)

Mabel came to visit Lebam that night after the others were asleep. Mabel looked exhausted.

"What's that sweet stuff I smell on you?" Lebam asked.

"Smile Dip," said Mabel. "We raided an abandoned convenience store with Wendy and her friends."

"Do you have more? I want some," said Lebam.

"No. It's evil stuff," said Mabel. "I pigged out on it so much that never want to eat it again."

"No fair! I want to pig out too," said Lebam.

"It's banned, past its expiration date, and it will give you hallucinations," said Mabel.

"Now I really want it," said Lebam. "Where's the convenience store? I want to go raid it now on your bike."

"If you must," said Mabel. "Watch out for the ghosts."

"You met ghosts, too?" asked Lebam. "I'm definitely doing this."

"Just tell them you're not a teenager and you should be all right."

***

Lebam biked out to the Dusk 2 Dawn store. The owner ghosts were friendly.

"May I please have a big box of Smile Dip to take home?" she asked them.

"I'd rather not give out our merchandise for free," said Ma Duskerton.

"We really enjoyed that Lamby Lamby dance your brother did for us," said Pa Duskerton. "Can you do it too?"

"Dancing is Dipper's thing, but I can sing. I'll sing the second verse. Dipper and I used to giggle over that part when we were younger, but now he usually skips it," said Lebam.

"When you're grazing on the grassy-grassy,  
Yum-yum! Yum-yum!  
Be sure that you don't get too gassy-gassy,  
Burp-burp! Burp-burp!"

"Delightful," said Ma.

"You've earned your Smile Dip," said Pa.

Lebam went to the display. "Oh, it's almost all gone."

"No problem, with our ghostly convenience-store powers," said Pa.

He gestured and a small stack of full Smile Dip boxes appeared in front of Lebam.

"Thank you!" Lebam said.

She loaded the boxes onto her bike basket, holding them steady with her chin as she rode back to the house.

"I'm gonna get so sick," she thought.

***

After capturing an image of the Question Mark for Soos the next day (just because he was always around), Gompers had a complete Ring. (The Fez Symbol, Glasses, and Six-Fingers were already there). The control program in Gompers transmitted the complete set of symbols back in time to before Bill first showed them to McGucket.

"I saw ten symbols, all righty," McGucket said.

"Good, now we have complete information," said the being. "Two of the symbols are for two brothers, the Pine twins Stanford and Stanley. We need to get both of them here."

***

Everything went as before... and everything was in place except for the last missing Journal. Bill still didn't know where to find it. He kept looking outside Gravity Falls.


	15. Adventures for Lebam

Mabel and Dipper coaxed Grunkle Stan into taking them out for breakfast, but they almost wished they hadn't. The cheapskate only wanted one-fourth of the number seven (to split between the three of them), plus a free salad dressing for Mabel, and a small plate of ketchup for Dipper.

Things went a little better when Dipper spotted the Manliness Tester (with a prize of free pancakes). As Mabel and Grunkle Stan expected, he only scored a "cutie patootie," but his efforts attracted the attention of Manly Dan, who easily won the prize with his little finger. There were pancakes for everyone.

Dipper was discouraged and wandered off somewhere. Mabel returned to the house and woke Lebam, who had slept late after a rough night with the Smile Dip. Lebam breakfasted on an old book while they talked.

"Dipper has gone off into the woods today," Mabel said. "He texted me that he's working on his manliness, so that will take a really long time. This is a good chance to practice being me for a day."

"Are there any plans?" Lebam asked.

"I have a project for you," Mabel said. "You can work on getting Grunkle Stan ready to ask Lazy Susan out. He needs a lot of work on his relationship skills."

"I love it," said Lebam. "Those two would be perfect for each other. Grunkle Stan needs a lot of work, though."

"I'll tag team with you if it gets too rough," said Mabel.

"Thanks, Mabel, but I'm sure I can handle it," said Lebam, and she was instantly wearing a copy of the green sweater with mushrooms that Mabel had on.

Lebam went downstairs with Mabel's instant camera and scrapbook. After enlisting Soos to help, she went to find Stan.

Stan was shuffling a deck of cards in preparation for a game of solitaire.

"Okay, Grunkle Stan. Welcome to the first day of whatever is left of your life! First, a before picture," said Lebam.

She set off the camera flash and surprised Stan so much that the picture showed his ghastly startled face and cards flying everywhere. She put the picture on a blank page of the scrapbook.

"Let's start out with some roleplaying. Soos will play Lazy Suzan," said Lebam.

"I'm soft, like a woman," said Soos, who had put on a Lazy Susan outfit. He didn't mind looking foolish to play a trick on Stan.

"Grunckle Stan, show me how you approach a woman. Remember this is a safe, non-judgemental environment. I'll just be right off the side judging you on a scale from one to ten," said Lebam.

She was holding up a pen and a notepad. She realized she had the pen in her left hand and her notebook in the right, so she quickly set the writing materials down.

"Can I borrow some money?" Stan asked Soos.

Lebam blew a whistle. "This is gonna be harder than I thought."

She came up a little while later and found Mabel in her room.

"Tag. I'm going to need help," she said.

"Don't worry, I've got a Training Mix disc that's a sure thing. Nothing makes a training montage go faster than music," said Mabel.

Mabel went downstairs while Lebam rested in her bed.

A while later, Mabel came back up.

"Tag. I'm getting nowhere. I tried to shave off his chest hair, but it grew back too fast," said Mabel.

"I'm not giving up," said Lebam.

Soon she decided that Lazy Susan might like Stan as a fixer-upper, so she took him to the diner. Susan, surprisingly, gave Stan her phone number.

Lebam was ecstatic, and started babbling about calling Susan right away, about not having a phone, and about getting a phone. About then, Dipper showed up and she babbled some more about seeing him through the window.

***

Later she told Mabel how it had gone. "I realized later that you do have a cell phone, that black one. I don't have one myself, though. It might be good if I could get one. I'm glad Grunkle Stan was paying more attention to his cherry pie than to me."

"I'll see if I can find a prepaid disposable phone in town," said Mabel. "I'll try to find one that looks the same."

"I hope nobody else noticed," Lebam asked. "Has anyone seen your phone?"

"I don't use it much; the phone signal is bad out here. Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland have. They confiscated our stuff for a while when we were arrested for counterfeiting, and had a big laugh about our fancy computer phones," said Mabel.

"I remember your memory of that," said Lebam. "That happened before I was cloned from you."

"That's right," said Mabel. "Any other problems with the swaps today?"

"I may have been too silly when I saw Dipper. I said such obvious stuff about seeing him through the window. I was just so excited about finding someone for Grunkle Stan," said Lebam.

"Don't worry about it. It's hard to play me too silly," said Mabel.

"At least I remembered to use my right hand when I pulled his one chest hair for the scrapbook," said Lebam. "It might have hurt him a little more that way, but I didn't give myself away."

"You did well, sister," said Mabel. "We'll try again soon."

***

The day after, there was to be a dance at the Mystery Shack. Lebam decided to go into the woods to stay out of the way, since having so many people around increased the chance that she would be discovered.

Mabel and Dipper found out that the copying machine in Stan's office could make living duplicates of people or parts of people, but that they dissolved easily in water. (This was an experimental machine made by Stanley to see if he could duplicate alien cloning technology. It was less than a success, so he just gave it to Stan to use in his office. Stan discovered he could clone a melt-able copy of his head, and he was practicing a trick to scare away trick-or-treaters at Summerween.)

Lebam ran into Dipper's clones "3" and "4" in the woods, trying to decide whether or not to return to the party after stealing Robbie's bike. They decided they would be in the way and that they would last longer in the woods, as long as it didn't rain.

"As you can see, Dipper decided to use the copy machine we found," said the one with a "4" on his hat. "We took Robbie's bike to get him out of the way so that Dipper can use his master plan to talk to Wendy and get her to dance with him."

"You don't have to worry about me telling," said Lebam. "I'm a copy, too."

"Really? Mabel used the copy machine, too?" asked "3."

"No, I'm a magic mirror doppelganger. You can call me Lebam."

"You can call me Fred," said "3". "He can be Rick."

Lebam knew that Dipper's real name was Frederic. The twins had been named for a couple in "The Pirates of Penzance" because they had been born on February 29th, 2000 (or so the family believed ... it was actually a date picked by the Time Baby). The whole Pines family was big on using names from that comic opera: General Stanley and Pirate Samuel were also characters from it.

"Hey, why do you get the first part of Dipper's real name?" asked Rick.

"I'm lower numbered, so I get priority," said Fred.

"Nice to meet you, Fred and Rick. It's good to talk to a couple of guys I can be myself with instead of having to pretend to be Mabel," said Lebam.

"Want to hang out with us for a while?" asked Rick.

"Sure, I'd love the company," said Lebam.

"Just as buddies," said Fred.

"Even though we're not related... just copies of a brother and sister," said Rick with a trace of regret.

"Of course," said Lebam. "No mushy stuff."

Both the boys winced.

"Did I say something wrong?" asked Lebam.

"You reminded us of what happens when we touch anything wet," said Fred. "We turn into mushy stuff."

"Definitely platonic, then," said Lebam, with a slight trace of regret herself.

She camped out with Fred and Rick for a couple of days. She lost them in a sudden downpour when they couldn't get to shelter in time.

***

When Lebam got back to the woods near the Mystery Shack, Mabel told her she had missed the Pioneer Day Celebration, and that she and Dipper had uncovered a national secret.

"We nearly got shipped off to Washington DC in a crate, and locked up for the rest of our lives, to preserve the secret," Mabel told her.

(They were saved by a woodpecker, thanks to the intervention of Gompers. The goat was watching out for them in town, passing the time by attending the wedding ceremony of a woodpecker and a man. He saw that the police were following them and anticipated trouble, so he transferred some of the control program into the woodpecker, so that it could help get them free. The bird ending up leaving her husband and migrating south after that, much to the man's distress.)

"Sorry I wasn't there to help," said Lebam. "I met a couple of cute guys in the woods, though."

"Dipper's clones? He told me two of them never came back," said Mabel.

"Well, they were cute, in a way, but that's not who I meant," said Lebam.

She waved to the woods and two pale-skinned young men came out. They were very handsome, with long black hair.

"Meet Vlad and Bela," said Lebam.

"How do you do?" said Vlad and Bela, with foreign accents.

"Bella? Isn't that a girl's name?" asked Mabel.

"Bela is a man's name in Eastern Europe," said Bela. "In Transylvania, for example."

"Transylvania? Are you vampires?" Mabel asked.

"Yes," said Vlad, showing fang tips.

"Squee! Lebam, you did good!"

"I know! They want to double-date us," said Lebam.

They went on a secret date that night, which went well until the vampires got carried away.

"We could turn you into vampires, too," said Vlad. "You could be with us forever."

"Forever? I'm not ready for that level of commitment, guys," said Mabel.

"Me neither," said Lebam.

"Farewell then," said Bela. The vampires turned into giant bats and flew away.

"Hey, we never even got a kiss," complained Lebam.

"Guys," said Mabel. "It's all or nothing with them."

"Like the gnomes," said Lebam.

"And Gideon," said Mabel.

"Don't get me started on him," said Lebam, with a grim look.

"When are we going to find a nice guy apiece for a summer romance?" asked Mabel.

"I don't know, but let's not tell Dipper about the vampires," said Lebam.

"By the way, Dipper got locked in your closet by some of his clones and he found your Smile Dip stash," said Mabel. "He asked me about it."

"What did you say?" Lebam asked.

"I said I might start eating it again if I feel the need to be wild and crazy," Mabel said.

"And he said?"

"That I don't really need any help with that," said Mabel.

***

Lebam stayed hidden during the carnival Grunkle Stan put on at the Mystery Shack. She asked Mabel to buy an extra cotton candy and bring it to her, but Mabel saw a pig she could win at a weight-guessing contest, and she got so excited she threw the treats on the ground. Lebam wasn't mad about it because she loved Waddles on sight, just as Mabel did.

She was disappointed about missing out on a time-travel adventure, though. Mabel offered to let her take the whole next day, and to do whatever adventure or Grunkle Stan fix-up project she liked.

***

The next day was quiet and pleasant, with a trip to the Arcade, then home for a card game which Lebam won with beginner's luck, then some TV watching in the afternoon while Dipper got in trouble with Robbie for breaking his phone, and he went somewhere to hide.

Lebam finally found a fix-up project when Grunkle Stan showed he had a fear of heights by refusing to use a ladder. She tried various tricks to get him to admit his fear, but nothing worked until he saw a skydiving program on television, and screamed.

"So I have a fear of heights. Is that really so cray-cray?" asked Stan.

Lebam finally had a cell phone, one she bought for herself while downtown during the arcade trip. She texted Mabel, who was hiding in her room, and asked for help with a plan. Mabel thought about it while talking to Dipper, who had brought Rumble McSkirmish, the video game fighter, up to their room. Rumble was going to act as his bodyguard in the fight with Robbie, Dipper said.

"Use the scout's honor/double cross 2 trick him," Mabel sent after Dipper left.

"I'll do fast-change type 4," Lebam sent back. They had practiced clothing reflecting tricks and Lebam was now an expert.

She sneaked behind Stan's chair and shouted, "Hey, Grunkle Stan!"

This made him do a spit-take with a mouthful of soda.

"How would you like to take a walk nowhere in particular while wearing a blindfold?" Lebam asked.

"Eh! It beats just sitting around being old," said Stan. "Wait a minute. You're not planning on taking me somewhere super high up, are you?"

"Grunkle Stan! I would never! Scout's honor," said Lebam.

She focused on the new outfit she knew Mabel was wearing, without saying her name aloud, and she was able to instantly create a duplicate sweater from "thin air," and change her headband and skirt color at the same time. The sweater showed a scout finger pledge. (This was actually accomplished by rapid hair generation, high-speed telekinesis on the fibers, and mental illusion, though Lebam herself thought it was magic).

"All right, let's go," said Stan, heading for the door.

Lebam chuckled. She flipped her long hair over the back of the sweater, which showed crossed fingers, the sign of a double-cross. She blindfolded Stan and led him to the top of the Gravity Falls water tower.

"Take off your blindfold now!" said Lebam.

Grunkle Stan took it off and stared at the ground far below. "Yeah, that was pretty much what I was expecting."

"You're doing better than I thought," said Lebam. "Now let go of the hand-rail."

"No!" said Stan.

"Hey, do you smell anger, and hormones?" Lebam asked. Her llama senses were kicking in again.

Robbie came up the ladder, panting hard.

"Hey Robbie! Get your own water tower," said Lebam.

"Keep it down, he'll find us!" said Robbie.

Rumble McSkirmish was below, looking for a way to bring his opponent to the ground. "You can hide, but you cannot hide!"

Rumble began punching the leg of the tower, making it sway.

"We're safe, right?" Lebam asked. Her natural llama height fearlessness was beginning to crumble.

"Of course not!" said Stan. "This thing is on stilts, high, high up!"

The tower continued to sway, Robbie fell off (only to be caught by Rumble), and Stan and Lebam ran around like chickens.

The attacking video game figure left and the tower finally steadied. Lebam stood petrified beside Stan.

"I'm sorry, Grunkle Stan. I thought this would help, but I was wrong," Lebam said. "So wrong!"

"I survived," said Stan. "I survived and I feel great! Wait, let me do a cocky dance, just to be sure."

He waggled his hips and made funny musical sounds.

"Ha! Deal with it, world. Stan Pines has cured his fear of heights!"

He went to the ladder. "Coming, kid?"

"Uh-uh," said Lebam, standing frozen.

"What's the matter? You got a fear of heights now?"

Lebam didn't answer, but turned her face away from the ladder.

"Oh-oh," said Stan.

He had to carry her down the ladder. She was stiff as a board from fear.


	16. The Turning of the Fez

The next few days after the water-tower incident, Lebam stayed hidden in the closet. She didn't want to come out and face the stairs. Eventually, her natural llama's sure-footedness on heights would recover. Dipper was in pain for a few days after being punched by Rumble's Super-Power-Ninja-Turbo-Neo-Ultra-Hyper-Mega-Multi-Alpha-Meta-Extra-Uber-Prefix Combo, but he survived, thanks to his tough android constitution.

Mabel suggested a tournament of games with Dipper that wouldn't require much physical action, while he healed. They started with sitting-down games like chess and checkers, then worked their way up to ping-pong and croquet as he got better. Dipper creamed her in every game.

Soos didn't like how badly Dipper was treating Mabel, being so competitive and rubbing her face in his victories. Soos used his android senses to measure their heights, and when he found Mabel was one millimeter taller. made sure they knew by asking Mabel to get something off the shelf for him. Unfortunately, Mabel was feeling so put down by all the losses that she got back at Dipper with short jokes, and Grunkle Stan joined in. Dipper retreated to his bedroom to consult the Journal for height-altering answers.

***

Bill Cipher was beyond desperate. A message had come through from the Time Baby, "Something seems to be wrong that you have not reported, 618. If all is not ready by the deadline, you will be sent to Robot Tartarus with your program in an infinite loop of pain and misery."

Desperate times called for desperate measures. It was all the fault of McGucket. If the accursed man hadn't started a series of events on July 4, 1982, then the portal codes would not have been lost and Journal 2 would not be missing. McGucket had betrayed Bill; he would have to be eliminated.

It was an extremely dangerous paradox loop, and time itself would fight him, but he had to try it. Adding to the Ring information that was sent back in time he added a little more text: "Get rid of Fiddleford McGucket by July 4, 1982."

***

"I saw ten symbols, all righty," McGucket said.

"Good, now we have complete information," said the being. "Two of the symbols are for two brothers, the Pine twins Stanford and Stanley. We need to get both of them here."

Bill was certainly not going to share the new piece of "complete information" with McGucket, of course. There was plenty of time to plan the man's demise. He would have to wait until Glasses and Fez Symbol arrived to make sure McGucket transferred all his knowledge to them. Then the old coot would be disposable.

***

In the summer of 1981, Bill was ready to act. He needed something dramatic and permanent that would take McGucket out of normal space-time, so that the self-correcting effects of time could not rescue him. A wormhole would do the trick: effectively a Bottomless Pit. It would be a slow death by thirst for McGucket as he fell forever.

Bill constructed the wormhole near the shack. He didn't want to be present when McGucket fell in, or he might be detected by Time Agents. Instead, he added a wind field generator; it was triggered by a detector for the fez with the Big Fish leadership symbol (McGucket wore it only when he was going to meetings of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel.) Bill tested the Bottomless Pit trap by throwing in inanimate objects; they never came back out.

McGucket always came out early, to get the Royal Order meeting room ready. His path always took him near the pit. Nobody saw him as the wind pushed him in; the trap recorded a successful activation.

But time had worked against Bill, since he was trying to change a huge future outcome based on information from the future only known after the outcome, a paradox. The wormhole was flawed: it actually connected back to normal space, about an hour later, but only for animate objects.

McGucket emerged from the Bottomless Pit angry and frightened. He was certain that Bill had done this to him. He headed off into the deep woods, into hiding. He made a new outfit from animal skins that completely cloaked his face and concealed the shape of his body. His wilderness skills would let him live off the land. He would lie low for a year and then sneak back to warn the others of Bill's evil nature.

Bill came back to check his trap. Since it recorded activation it seemed all was well; he would never see that traitor again. He turned off the wind field activator, but left the Pit in place. Stan would later discover it as a convenient dumping ground.

Since McGucket had vanished, the Royal Order held a promotion ceremony for Stan Pines, the next in line for command. He got a new fez, with a fish opening an angular mouth to eat something: the Big Fish.

***

It was the evening of the fourth of July, 1982. Stan was off in town to watch the fireworks. Stanley and Ruth were in their room. McGucket sneaked in and was writing in his room a new page titled, "Bill Cipher," with a much darker image of the entity. He wrote down a verbal code he had discovered that would force Bill to take someone along into a dreamscape when Bill invaded someone's mind. (This was the result of the self-correcting nature of time, trying to restore the outcomes that a paradox-producer had wanted to change).

On the page with the image McGucket started to write his new concerns about Bill's character. Nervously he wrote at the top, "Is he watching me?" He wrote down a list of codes and scratched out each one, codes he suspected Bill had broken.

Something seemed to go fuzzy in his mind. He looked down at the page again and realized he had written, "Bill has proven himself to be one of the friendliest and most trustworthy individuals that I've ever encountered in my life. What a guy! I honestly can't trust him more. Not evil in any way, Bill is a true gentleman."

Bill was in him, McGucket knew, trying to possess him.

"I've got you," Bill's voice said, echoing in his mind.

McGucket did the only thing he could. He put the extra little finger of his right hand into his mouth, and bit it off. Blood spurted over the page. The pain cleared his mind and he was able to shake off Bill, for the moment at least.

"I withdraw permission for ya to enter my mind!" he said. Bill was momentarily halted while he tried to override this programming with his emergency codes.

McGucket seized the book and ran for the room of Ruth and Stanley.

"The demon knows I'm onto him!" McGucket shouted. "He'll be after ya next. Time to make a plan."

Thanks to the outcome preserving actions of time, the plan was the same as before and the results were the same as before. Bill had failed – again.

***

The change in fez symbol as a side-effect of his tampering was an annoyance to the Bill of 2012. He would have to be careful when the fez symbol change rippled through to the future, since Dipper and Mabel might detect something happening with their android time-ripple-protected vision. It would be easy to set up an illusion projection around the hat so that the change would be less noticeable. Gompers was sent instructions to make that happen.

Soos had his own instruments set up that detected the approaching ripple and its symbol-changing nature. Just to mess with Bill, he suggested to Stan that he set up a Hall of Mirrors in the Mystery Shack ballroom, and Stan happily took credit for the idea. Projected illusions had trouble with mirrors (like Lebam's clothing).

The Gompers control program was aware of the mirror issue, and it tried to correct for it in the Hall of Mirrors room. The result was still defective; the fez symbol reversed, all right, but there were noticeable problems with the reflections of people. The brown hair of Soos was gray in his reflection. When Stan took of his hat in front of the mirror, his hand positions were shown incorrectly in the illusory reflection.

Soos picked up the fez and tried it on to check out the illusion.

"One day!" he said aloud.

One day Bill would be defeated. The Time Baby and all his robots would be thwarted, and there might be a chance for Soos to revive the Olympians again.

***

Meanwhile, the height dispute between Mabel and Dipper had resulted in Dipper discovering size-altering crystals from another dimension that had been dumped in the woods after an early portal experiment. Dipper made a size-altering flashlight and used it to gain height on Mabel.

"What happened?" Mabel asked when she entered their bedroom and found out how tall Dipper was.

"You know, puberty and stuff," said Dipper.

"It doesn't make any sense. Just a second ago you were- wait a minute! This is some kinda magicky thing. Isn't it? Was it a wizard or something? There's a wizard in this closet, isn't there? Isn't there!?"

"What? No!" said Dipper.

Mabel said, "You're telling me that there is not a wizard in this closet. You're telling me that if I open this door right now-"

Dipper said, "Fine! Open it!"

Mabel opened the closet door and found nothing. "An invisible wizard! REALLY Dipper?"

Dipper finally admitted it was a magic flashlight, and they started to fight over it.

As they left the room, Mabel called to the invisible wizard, "I'll be back for you later."

The invisible wizard sighed to himself. When she got back, he wouldn't be there. Cross-dimensional astral projection was exhausting. Interesting as it was to spy on his "grandchildren," it was time to return to his prison.


	17. Size Matters

In the yard, the battle of the Pine Twins continued, with each growing or shrinking parts of each other, until the flashlight ended up in the hands of Gideon Gleeful. He shrunk them both and put them in a jar (it had once contained cursed termites he tried to use to threaten Stan). Gideon took the jar home and shook Dipper and Mabel out on his desk, where he had made a small model of the Mystery Shack using popsicle sticks.

"What are you going to do with us?" asked Mabel.

Gideon laughed "Why Mabel, I wouldn't hurt a hair on your itty-bitty head - if you agree to be my queen!"

"We live in a democracy!" said Mabel. "And never!"

"Maybe you'll change your mind after THIS!" said Gideon, picking Mabel up.

Mabel said, "No! I will fight you until the day I..."

Gideon put her inside a bag of candy.

Mabel said, "Gummy Koalas! Mmm!" She started in on a green one.

"As for you, boy," said Gideon, turning a bright lamp on Dipper. "Tell me, how exactly did you come upon this magic item? Hmm? Did somebody tell you about it? Did you... READ about it somewhere?"

"Lean closer and I'll tell you!" said Dipper.

When Gideon leaned in, Dipper set off an air horn in his ear.

Gideon got so angry he nearly squashed Dipper, but instead he said, "Steel yourself, Gideon... You can use them. You can use them..."

Gideon tried to ransom them for the Mystery Shack to Stan over the phone. Stan didn't believe him, and hung up when Gideon said he would text him a photo. Then Gideon came to the realization that the shrinking ray could be a weapon, that he could shrink Stan and take the shack without any need for ransom.

He was interrupted by the arrival of the ice cream truck. He left the room, leaving his (highly unintelligent) hamster Cheekums to guard them.

Dipper and Mabel managed to sneak out the house through a doggie door, and they used a flying discount dollar balloon to fly back to the Mystery Shack just as Gideon arrived by bus. (It was good that Mabel wasn't affected by Lebam's acrophobia, or the escape would have been much more difficult).

They temporarily delayed Gideon by dropping the rest of Mabel's green Gummy Koala in his hair. They could have grown back to normal size and defeated him, but they got arguing about height again. Gideon picked them up.

"Little Dipper... I daresay you would have defeated me, if it wasn't for your sibling bickering!"

He pushed open the door of the Shack and blasted the first person he saw wearing a fez. "The Shack is mine, Stanford Pines!"

It turned out to be Soos, still wearing the hat. Gideon picked up Soos and put all three in the bug jar and the jar in his pocket.

Gideon shook the jar. "Tell me where Stan is!'

Soos said, "Never! you'll never find Stan. On the second door to the left down the hall. Wait, why did I say that?"

(Gideon still retained some mind-control ability, even though he had lost the amulet. Increased intelligence, insanity, and psychic abilities were side effects of its long-term use. At this relative size to Soos, it was enough to strike a weak point in the handyman's mind and compel an answer.)

Gideon shoved the jar in his pocket and went looking for Stan. From inside the jar, the three could see Gideon's school ID card, with the number "618." He had demanded his parents get him that number, because of the curious "618 618 618" he saw on one page of his Journal, which he thought might be a magical number).

The twins made up their differences over heights and games. Working as a team with Soos, they got out of the jar. Soos fell off soon after, but Mabel and Dipper continued to ride Gideon's shoulders near his soft neck.

Gideon went after Stan in the Hall of Mirror, smashing mirrors to try to find the real Stan.

"You little troll!" said Stan. "Those mirror costed me ten, I mean eh twenty-five, five-hundred. Five-hundred dollars each, and your paying for all of 'em!"

"Au contraire. It will be you who pays!" said Gideon. He aimed the shrink flashlight at Stan.

"Grunkle Stan is doomed!" said Mabel to Dipper.

"Not completely doomed! To his armpit!" said Dipper.

"Uh-uh," said Mabel.

Dipper pushed her down into the smelly, sweaty armpit and together they tickled Gideon into collapse. Stan rolled Gideon out of the Mystery Shack. The flashlight fell out of his pocket and the twins jumped off.

"My light!" said Gideon.

"You're the light of my life too, pal," said Stan, closing the door on him.

The twins restored themselves to their original heights. Dipper didn't mind Mabel being taller any more. He let her keep her millimeter.

"Well I guess we should destroy this thing. You know so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands and junk," said Mabel.

"Seems like the smart thing to do," said Dipper.

Mabel smashed the crystal to the floor, saying, "Die! Die!"

Then they remembered they still hadn't un-shrunk Soos (when he spelled out a message for help with the smashed pieces).

"Glue," said Mabel.

"Lots of glue," said Dipper.

Glue didn't work, so Dipper had to go out into the woods again for another crystal. They also had to un-shrink the giant chess pawn in their attic room, that Dipper had made during his experiments with the growth beam. Soos helped them fix the hole in the roof.

Dipper secretly made one small adjustment to a portion of his anatomy, something he hoped Wendy might like. Then he destroyed the flashlight, again.

Everything was back to normal, except for the fez-changing effects still rippling through. Gompers decided to focus the illusion on the perception of the hat itself and not worry about the reflections so much. Trying to fix both at once was too complicated.


	18. Stan's Summerween

Stan prepared for a shopping expedition to the Summerween Superstore. He made a list of things to get: three barrels of fake blood, a couple of Jack-O-Melons, and a bag of assorted "loser candy" for Dipper to give out when Stan was too busy to scare the trick-or-treaters away empty-handed.

He had been warned not to create realistic art for counterfeiting purposes, but nobody said anything about unrealistic art. It was worth a try: people around here would believe anything. He drew up some "Stan Bucks" with a picture of himself saying "It's money!".

As he drew up a fifty, a small time glitch passed through. His drawing of the fez symbol on the fake money turned out part-way between his old fez symbol and his new one; it had the "mouth" of the new symbol but no circle for the fish to eat. Glitches and instabilities in time sometimes happened with paradoxical time meddling like Bill's trying to kill McGucket.

The store visit went well, and they returned with the "purchases" as he planned. The store worker had called the police, but with the poor law enforcement in this town he didn't expect any trouble.

While the kids made plans for trick-or-treating together, he made some additional preparations. He wanted to use Waddles for a chest-popping trick, but he doubted Mabel would let him. She already had a businessman costume ready for the pig to wear around the house later, so she could do a photo session for one of her albums.

"I need to borrow you for a minute, pig," Stan told Waddles. He picked up the animal and took him into his office to make a copy on the copying machine Stanley built. He also made several copies of his own head.

"Hey, what's the deal?" one of his head copies asked him.

"I need you to scare off the deadbeat trick-or-treaters," he explained.

"Okay, its a good cause," said the head. It was lucky that copies were so co-operative and didn't mind being sacrificed for the greater good.

Stan locked the copies in his office and went to direct Soos in decorating up the place. (Wendy had gone off somewhere with her friends to help plan a Summerween party).

***

When the twins were gone off with their friends, he got ready for his first trick-or-treat scare. Most kids knew enough not to come to his door, but there were always a few bunches of them too idiotic to resist a try.

He put on a regular skull mask, then injected one of his paper copy heads with just enough water to melt in a few seconds. He balanced the copy head on his own, which he ducked down under his costume cloak.

He opened the door and the clone head spoke for him: "What can I do for y... uh, ugh. Oh no! No! Aaagh!"

The head melted down to a skull as he planned. While the kids recoiled and ran, he threw what was left of it into a bucket of water inside, and poked his own skull-masked head out. He removed the mask and laughed. Then he looked down. Two kids, one in a mummy costume and one in a soldier costume, hadn't run away.

"Can we have candy now?" asked the soldier kid.

"What's the matter with you kids?" asked Stan. "That was the scariest thing you've ever seen, right?"

The mummy kid made a "so-so" hand gesture.

"Well, have you seen this! Ah!" said Stan, pulling out a sausage chain covered in fake blood from under his costume. "Guts! Real, very real guts!"

"Uh, we've been watching horror movies since we were like, two years old," said the mummy kid.

"Yeah, we're not scared," said the soldier kid.

"Oh, you will be," said Stan. "You will be."

He went inside to collect the Waddles copy from his office.

Outside, the kids chanted, "We want candy! We want candy!"

Stan came to the door again.

"Alright, you got me kids. You guys win. I guess I'm not that scary, you know, you've-you've- Oh! No! Ughh!"

He pushed the pig out from under his costume.

"Why?! Why is there a pig jumping out of my chest?!"

The pig landed on the porch and waddled away. (The real Waddles had already wandered outside in his businessman costume, and he would return later).

"Candy!" said the soldier kid.

"Candy!" said the mummy kid.

"What scares you two freaks?" Stan asked.

The soldier kid produced a cell phone and showed him a kitten creepypasta, which made Stan scream.

He ran inside and shut the door. He looked in the "Master of Fright" mirror. He was too upset to notice that his fez symbol was an un-reversed illusion.

"What happened to you, Stan Pines? What happened?"

He went to the bathroom to take a shower. Meanwhile, the fearless kids toilet-papered the yard.

"Where is he?" asked the solider kid.

"Let's just get our candy already!" said the mummy kid.

They both went inside, and the mummy kid called, "Old dude? Old dude?"

Stan was still saying, "What happened to you, Stan? What happened?" when the kids came into the bathroom.

Stan's towel dropped. This was too much for the kids. They screamed and ran.

"Ha ha ha! Still got it!" said Stan.

***

Later, after his shower, the kids and Soos came home. They seemed to have had some trouble.

"I can't believe that after all that, we didn't even get any candy!" said Mabel.

"Candy? How's this for candy?" said Stan, holding up two large sacks of candy the scared kids had dropped.

They watched "The Fear Guide From Terror Town Street" together, and ate lots of the soldier and the mummy's candy.

"You know what I've learned?" Stan said. "Summerween isn't about scaring or candy. It's a time for the whole family to get together and celebrate what matters most: PURE EVIL! HAHAHAHAHA!"

Stan was feeling evil now, and enjoying it. He knew from the creature who visited his dreams that an apocalypse was coming. Buying gold chains and burying them would help when banks collapsed; he and his family would have something of true value, and be rich in comparison to everyone else. If they all don't die, of course. But Stan had his guns and he would have access to the secrets of the portal. All thanks to his dream-demon friend, Bill Cipher, who could predict the future. Once they finally had all the Journals, that is. He wondered how Bill was getting along with finding them.

Soos said, "I ate a man alive tonight."


	19. Boss Lebam

After Summerween, Lebam was finally over her acrophobia enough to go up and down the stairs. Mabel filled her in on their adventures of being shrunk by Gideon and almost eaten by the Summerween Trickster. Lebam was eager to participate and have some new adventures of her own.

***

The next opportunity for substitution came when Mabel gave Lebam the chance to run the register at the Mystery Shack while Dipper was occupied with being a "wolf boy" for the crowd.

"Behold! Mystery Shack bumper stickers! You can stick them on your bumper, or over your husband's mouth. Am I right, ladies? She knows what I'm talking about!" said Lebam.

"Oh! You are bad! How much?" asked a woman customer.

Tickled by the complement, Lebam said, "Hey, it's on the house. That's the Mabel difference!"

Grunkle Stan came out from behind a cardboard cutout of himself. Angry with her for giving away merchandise, he took her off cash-register duty.

"But, but..." stammered Lebam.

"No buts, except yours out the door," said Stan. "Now shut your yap and get to work."

"Grunkle Stan, whatever happened to 'please' and 'thank you'? Hmm? Oh wait. Here they are!"

Lebam stuck stickers with those words on Stan's face. He transferred "Please" to the cash-register and "Thank You" to Soos' back.

"'Please' never made me any money, kid. In fact, just saying the word gives me a burning sensation," said Stan.

Dipper came up to the counter and complained about his itchy wolf boy costume. "I think I'm getting hookworm."

"Yep. Gluing dog hair to your body will do that," said Stan.

Dipper and Lebam agreed that Stan should look for real attractions instead of fake ones, and that he should be nicer to the employees.

"Look, you guys have a problem the way I run the Shack, take it up with the complaint department," said Stan, offering a trash can.

Lebam knew he was being sarcastic, but she decided to play it straight to spoil the joke.

Grabbing a piece of paper, she said, "I'm going to write them such a letter."

Stan snorted and walked off.

Dipper said, "You know there isn't a real complaint department, right?"

Lebam said, "Of course I do. I wanted to spoil his sarcasm."

Dipper said, "The funny thing is, you're writing with your left hand."

Lebam realized she had done this out of habit. She instantly scribbled out her neat left-handed writing and turned it into a scrawl that said, "I'm pretending to write something."

She showed the note to Dipper. "See, pretending to write with my left hand was all part of the joke."

"I get it," Dipper said with a smile. "Pretty good, sis."

Soon Grunkle Stan demanded that all the employees get up on the roof and paint the sign with glitter to attract more tourists. Lebam excused herself for a moment and got Mabel. She was gradually getting over her acrophobia, but not enough to climb up on a rickety roof.

***

Later, Mabel came to visit Lebam in her closet.

"The workers got talking on the roof, and I found out that Grunkle Stan nixed a really good idea Soos had to be Questiony the Question Mark of the Mystery Shack. I went to complain to him," said Mabel.

"What happened?" Lebam asked.

"We ended up making a bet," said Mabel. "I have three days to run the Mystery Shack while Grunkle Stan goes on vacation. If he earns more money on his vacation than I do here, then I have to wear a shirt that says 'Loser' for the rest of the summer. If I win, he has to sing an apology song and do a dance, and I get to run the Shack for the rest of the summer."

"I'll help," said Lebam. "If you have to wear a 'Loser' shirt then so do I."

"This is going to be easy," said Mabel. "I've written an inspiring speech that will make everyone more productive. As for Grunkle Stan, how much money can he earn on vacation, anyway?"

***

They soon learned that Stan had got himself on as a contestant on Cash Wheel and he was raking in thousands of dollars in cash showers and cash floods.

Meanwhile, everything was going wrong at the Shack. The Soos Questiony suit was too revealing and scared customers away. Wendy got to have her friends in the Shack, but they just messed things up and customers got hurt. Dipper brought in a real Gremoblin, but its powers of making people see their worst nightmares had driven two customers insane.

***

By the third day, Mabel had collapsed in exhaustion and Lebam had taken over. She was overworking herself too, since Wendy and Soos had been given time off. Then she made another bad mistake: she gave the Gremoblin a key for a five-minute break, and soon it was out wrecking the store.

"What'll we do Dipper?" Lebam asked. "He's awarding himself stickers he didn't even earn."

Dipper got out his Book 3, "When fighting a gremoblin, use water..."

Lebam grabbed a glass of water and tossed it over the Gremoblin with her left hand.

Dipper continued, "...only as a last resort, since water will make him much, much scarier. Augh! Who writes sentences like that!? "

The Gremoblin grew larger, with spikes on its back and the added ability to breathe fire.

They hid again and waited for it to go away. Unfortunately, it became obsessed with making the talking fish say: "I'm da singin' salmon, spendin' all day jammin' ".

Then it tried to eat the jar of profits, and Lebam ran out yelling, "Stop! Stop!"

It grabbed her and caught her in its gaze and Lebam was in her worst nightmare, back in the clutches of Gideon Gleeful. Dipper saved her by showing the monster its own eyes in a mirror.

It moaned, "You've become your father" and ran away.

"Well, at least it didn't do that much damage," said Dipper, as the monster flew off, smashing the top of the totem pole onto a tourist's car.

"Dipper, we only have seven hours to earn back all our profits, or I'm going to have to wear that Loser shirt all summer," Lebam wailed.

Then Soos and Wendy showed up.

"Wendy, Soos, am I glad to see you," said Lebam. "We have a lot of work to do, but if we hurry we can still beat Stan."

"I've got a little headache," Wendy said. "Maybe I should, like, not work today."

"I just met this pack of wolves," Soos said. "I think they're gonna, like, raise me as one of their own. I really should be at the den right now."

"But, but..." said Lebam.

"But hey, see you on Monday," said Wendy, as Soos asked to eat two popsicles that had melted on the floor.

Lebam got angry, turning on the fighting spirit of a charging llama.

"ENOUGH!" she shouted. "I fought a monster to save this business, and this is how you repay me?"

She ranted, drawing on all the harsh words Stan had used to compel his lazy employees to work. Her pounding fist shook the hat-rack and Stan's fez fell onto her head.

She looked in the mirror, and saw the fez, with its symbol un-reversed, exactly as it appeared when she looked at Stan. (This was actually the illusion placed by Gompers, not her own clothing reflection trick).

"Dipper, what have I become?" asked Lebam.

"What you had to, Mabel," said Dipper, looking at her a bit oddly. There was something strange about how she looked, but he couldn't quite place it. He put it out of his mind: there was work to be done.

Working nonstop for seven hours, they just managed to turn a dollar of profit after paying for all the damages.

***

Stan showed up with nothing, having bet all his winnings on a final answer he couldn't get: the word "Please."

Stan said Mabel had won and she could run the Shack for the rest of the summer, but everyone begged Stan to take his job back. He did, but he still had to do a "sorry dance" for Mabel and Waddles.

In the middle of the dance, between takes 29 and 30, Stan's hat fell off and Gompers the goat grabbed it and chewed it into uselessness while Stan tried to pull it away.

"Blasted goat! Never mind, I've got a spare one," said Stan. (He couldn't get one from the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, who had kicked him out after the mysterious events of July 4, 1982, when his brother disappeared, but he was skilled enough at forging things to make his own backup copy).

That was the intent of the control program inside Gompers. Replacing the fez with another that had the new "Big Fish" symbol would make it easier to deal with. The time stream and memories were stable now. Everywhere the symbol appeared in the shop, it had changed. It had changed on Stan's bobble-heads. It had changed on the wax head of Stan that Mabel had put back together with its body.

To cover the time-tampering tracks further, Gompers sent back the changed symbol to the first appearance of the Ring to McGucket. Now even the drawing of Cipher's Wheel in Book 2 would be fixed, wherever it was; so would the other diagram of the Ring that McGucket had made on a larger piece of paper. Nobody would remember the change had happened, other than Bill and the control programs he had spawned.

(Except in the back of Lebam's mind, in her subconscious, the old symbol remained. Her copy of Mabel's memories was artificial and it had been preserved by a time glitch, unknown to the control program in Gompers).

Bill had places for Mabel and Lebam on his Ring, and through Gompers he was watching the Shooting Star and the Llama... very closely indeed. Everything was ready. If only he could find the last book with the portal code!


	20. Bottomless Pit

"Lebam, Grunkle Stan asked us to collect up any old things we want to get rid of, to throw somewhere they'll never come back. Do you have anything?"

"I've got some empty boxes of Smile Dip that are taking up space in my closet," said Lebam. "And some other stuff that bothers me, like creepy jars of alien heads and other crud, and a bag of loose deer teeth."

"Okay, you can put them in the large box we found. I'm going to put the Truth Teeth in there, but there's plenty of room for more stuff. Nobody has to see what else we're throwing out and connect it with your closet," Mabel said with a giggle.

They carried the junk to Mabel's bedroom. Dipper was already downstairs.

"I'm glad to get rid of the Truth Teeth," said Lebam. "Remember how Grunkle Stan kept yelling out all those things we didn't want to know?"

"Do you want to do this trash run, or shall I?" Mabel asked.

"It doesn't matter one way or the other to me. You can do it," said Lebam. "Hey, what's this bundle of papers in the corner by your bed?"

"Creepy love letters from Gideon," said Mabel.

"What? You've been keeping his love letters?" said Lebam.

"They're funny, in a weird sort of way," said Mabel.

"Nothing about Li'l Gideon is funny. You don't realize what he wanted to do to me, what he would have done if I hadn't gotten free," said Lebam.

"You really hate him, don't you?" said Mabel. "I have mixed feelings, because there were times when he was nice. If we could have stayed just friends, and makeover buddies..."

"Hate doesn't begin to cover how I feel," said Lebam. "He's responsible for the mess I'm in, having to share a life."

"Don't you like it here?" asked Mabel.

"Sure, it's fun, most of the time. But it's not a whole life. I'm always having to hide," said Lebam.

"Oh... I didn't realize how I would feel if I were you," said Mabel. "I mean, I am you, just in different circumstances."

"And it seems like I always get the days when we're trying to fix Grunkle Stan, and it never works," said Lebam. "Like his dating Lazy Susan, his fear of heights..."

"His business methods, his lying..." said Mabel.

"I've changed my mind. I want to go to that disposal place myself, take those letters, and make sure they're gone forever," said Lebam.

"Okay, sure," said Mabel.

***

"In this land of ours, there are many great pits. But none more bottomless than the bottomless pit. Which as you can see here is bottomless," said Stan.

"Question: is it bottomless?" asked Soos.

"Kids, can one of you try explaining this to Soos?" asked Stan.

"Grunkle Stan, why are we here again?" asked Dipper.

"To dispose of things that we don't want. So long, Mystery Shack suggestion cards!" said Stan.

"Goodbye, creepy love letters from Li'l Gideon. Die! Die!" said Lebam. She threw them into the pit as hard as she could, using her left hand for extra force.

Soos threw his shoes into the pit, not because he didn't want them but because everyone was throwing things.

Lebam went back to the Mystery Cart and got the large box with the Truth Teeth and the other stuff. She pushed it toward the pit.

"What you got there, Mabel?" asked Stan.

"Oh, it's just my personal box of mysterious secrets. Nothing worth wondering about," said Lebam with a giggle as she tipped in the box. "Goodbye forever!"

"Grunkle Stan, do I really have to be the one to point out that a bottomless pit is, by definition, impossible?" asked Dipper.

"Says you..." said Stan, still trying to get rid of complaint cards.

As Stan moved around the pit he stepped on a hidden switch, activating Bill's old trap for a man wearing the "Big Fish" fez symbol. Stan was now wearing that symbol.

"Well, I guess we'll never know," said Lebam.

A strong wind began to blow.

"Aah! It's some sort of invisible pushing force!" said Soos. (He realized it was something other than a normal wind, but the others didn't.)

Dipper tried to get everyone to run back into the Shack, but Stan kept trying to get rid of cards. They all tried to pull him back from the edge, but instead everyone fell in together.

Gompers the goat watched the hole for Bill Cipher. This was bad, very bad. If three Ring symbols had been lost, on top of everything else, Bill's eternity in Robot Tartarus would be even more unpleasant. But somehow McGucket had escaped, so maybe they would too. He waited and watched.

After a long period of screaming, Lebam realized they were in no immediate danger; there was no bottom to hit. She got out a glowstick so that they could see.

"We're somewhere where it looks like we're nowhere," she said.

"We're gonna land on something eventually," said Dipper. "It could be any second now."

They all cringed, but nothing happened. The worst immediate problem was boredom. Stan tried to do a card trick, but the cards all flew out of his hands. Lebam thought that was a good trick, so she applauded.

Soos suggested they pass the time by telling stories. Dipper started off with a pointless one about spending the rest of their lives in the pit. It sounded boring to Lebam, so she asked Dipper for something better. Sure, there was a very real possibility they were all going to die here, but come on, wasn't the story-telling to keep their minds off that?

"Fine," said Dipper. "I'll tell you a story. A story I'd like to call 'Voice Over'."

He told the story of how he got a voice-changing potion from Old Man McGucket. It was pretty close to what actually happened, Lebam thought, though she hadn't heard every detail from Mabel.

After the story, Labam tried changing the game to "I spy something that is black" and then "Spin the Dipper," but Grunkle Stan got bored and demanded a story from Soos.

Soos said, "Really? Ok. This story is called 'Soos' really good Pinball story. Is that a good title? Does it have to be a pun or whatever?'"

The story Soos told, Lebam thought, was mostly imaginary. She'd never seen the break room and pinball machine that Soos described in the Mystery Shack. Stan wasn't the type to provide that level of perks for his employees. But Soos was usually truthful; she would ask Mabel about it later.

(The story was in fact fictional, inspired by the tiny break room Soos actually had, a niche in the pipes and machinery behind a hall door. What nobody realized was that Soos had filled that room with machinery himself, after moving in a backup Zeus robot body piece by piece and assembling it in secret. It was his main body now. The short range to his android body made the projection of his personality much simpler. The old body, hidden in a cave in the woods, had fallen into disrepair and was deactivated.)

After that, Grunkle Stan told one called 'Grunkle Stan Wins the Football Bowl' that was also made up, and not entertaining. Except that he really had built a small football-playing robot once, with the help of Stanley. He never actually used it to win a game (that would have been too risky), but he could have, and that was the fun of the story for him.

Finally, Lebam herself was called on for a story, and she told about the Truth Teeth.

Soon after she told the story, they all fell out of the top of the Bottomless Pit. It made sense to Lebam, since it only had a top and no bottom. Dipper called it a "wormhole" but it was obviously much too large to have been made by a worm.

Lebam was happy with the time they had spent together, even though Stan fell back in the hole again and would have to wait another hour or so to come out.

She didn't see the love letters or the personal box of mysterious secrets, so she was content that they had fallen into some side dimension, hopefully far away.

***

If Gompers the goat knew differently, he wasn't talking.

Later, Lebam told Mabel all about the pit.

"You finally had a magical adventure with Dipper and everyone," said Mabel.

"I've gotten more confident with everyone, too," said Lebam. "The Truth Teeth story went well, even though I made some mistakes and changed a few details to protect the innocent, namely me."

"What did you change?" Mabel asked.

"I didn't say we planned it together. I just had you plan it by pretending to make Waddles talk," said Lebam.

"Did you say why we wanted the Truth Teeth in the first place?" asked Mabel.

"I said you were really bothered by all of Grunkle Stan's lies and wanted to force him to stop," said Lebam.

"I'm not that bothered by lies," said Mabel. "We lied about Great Uncle's Day to get Grunkle Stan to try on high heels, and then lied again to get him up on the water tower, remember?"

"Don't remind me," said Lebam with a shudder.

"What did you say I asked him when I first put in the Truth Teeth?" Mabel asked.

"Just about Dipper's spaghetti, as a test question to see if he would tell the truth," said Lebam. "Not about any deep secrets of the Mystery Shack, knowing he would forget everything he said once the teeth were out."

"I hope he can open that portal someday, and find his long-lost twin," said Mabel. "And maybe, if it can open to anywhere, we can find your mirror world."

"I'm starting to wonder if there even is a mirror world," said Lebam. "Maybe I'm just a lone clone without a home."

"Please don't give up hope," said Mabel.

"I'll try not to," said Lebam.

***

Stan looked at himself in the mirror, grinning with his real false teeth. He was still a little annoyed at Mabel for trying to the Truth Teeth on him. He'd read about them long ago, when they had all the Journals, and had taken an antidote, just in case. You had to get up pretty early in the morning to pull one over on old Stan Pines, and they were years too late.

A little more truth than he intended slipped out when the teeth first went in, about the existence of the portal, but after that he was just playing with them. He didn't really think there was any hope that he would find Stanley in some other dimension. Chances were that his brother had died years ago, in portal accident that Bill told him about.

As for the tax form with "I have committed tax fraud" on it, he never intended to send it in (it was a 2012 form anyway, for filing next year). One good thing had come of it – he was now positive his suspicions were correct, that the kids had Journal 3. They couldn't have found the teeth otherwise.


	21. Off the Deep End

A few days later it was 110 degrees, the hottest day of the summer. Lebam was baking in her tiny attic closet. When she finally sneaked out, she found that everyone else had left.

"Mabel!" she said, and was instantly in a red swim suit with a yellow star on the chest. Mabel had gone to the swimming pool and forgotten her. Lebam tried cooling herself off in the bathtub by filling it with ice water, but the ice quickly melted and the water turned hot. There was no air conditioning.

Mabel finally returned, all bubbly with joy over a merman she had met, named Mermando. Lebam pretended to feel happy for her but inside she only felt jealousy.

"I'm going to go back to the pool tonight and see him again," said Mabel. "Maybe get my first kiss."

***

Lebam got to the Mystery Cart that evening before Mabel did. She headed to the pool with an expression more grimly determined than happy, and broke in by reaching the skimmer net with her left arm, stepping on it roughly enough to bend it. She climbed the fence and called to Mermando, ready with scrapbooks to show him some of Mabel's life, to convince him that was who she was.

"Look! Here's a scrapbook of human stuff," said Lebam. "Here's me standing with my legs. And here I am kicking Dipper in his legs. He couldn't move his legs after that! Can you imagine? Not having legs?"

"Let's skip this book," said Mermando with a touch of anger in his voice.

She was doing something wrong, but she didn't know what.

"And here's my whole family kickboxing!"

Mermando sighed, turned his back, and swam to the middle of the pool. It just wasn't going well.

"What's wrong?" Lebam asked, wading over to him.

Mermando tried to strum a chord on his guitar, but it was filled with water.

"I too, used to have a family once. back in the ocean. How I miss them," he said, showing a family photograph from the shell around his neck.

Lebam touched his shoulder with her left hand. "Mermando, why don't you just leave the pool?"

Mermando described his bold and daring plan that ended up with him attacked by woodpeckers and wolves.

"No, I'm glad that I'm here, 'cause I met you," said Mermando.

A falling star shot through the air.

"This is it, 'Mabel'. First kiss moment, here we come! Just go for it!" thought Lebam. She puckered and closed her eyes.

"What are you doing with your mouth?" asked Mermando.

"Me? Nothing. This? I was eating some sour candy. So my lips were doing that. The candy was so sour," said Lebam.

"Can I have some candy?" asked Mermando.

"No," said Lebam. Her eyes rolled back and forth suspiciously.

"What is wrong?" said Mermando.

"Me. I'm wrong," said Lebam said with a sigh.

"What do you mean, Mabel?" asked Mermando.

"That's just it. I'm not Mabel. I'm Lebam, her mirror doppelganger," said Lebam. "There's no chemistry because I know I'm doing wrong."

"Why did you lie?" asked Mermando.

"I was jealous of Mabel. She has a life. She got to come here openly, cool off in the pool all day, and meet a wonderful guy, while I sweated in a hot house all alone. I was tempted: I wanted to meet you, too."

"I understand your feelings, and I appreciate your honesty, Lebam," said Mermando.

"I'm going back now to bring you the real Mabel," said Lebam. "And I'll work with her on a way to get you home."

"Thank you, Lebam. Know this: sixteen of my hearts are for Mabel. But you may have one, Lebam," said Mermando.

***

When Lebam got back to the house, Mabel was standing there in the yard, furious.

"Lebam! What did you do!?"

"I went to see Mermando for myself," said Lebam. "I pretended to be you."

"You tried to steal my first kiss!" said Mabel.

"Nothing happened. He's too homesick to want to get into a romance. I saved you some embarrassment, is all," said Lebam.

"But you tried. I'm red-hot mad at you, boyfriend kisser," said Mabel.

"I was angry at being left to bake in a hot house all day," said Lebam. "While you got to cool off in the pool and meet a great guy."

"I'm not sure I want you in the same house with me anymore," said Mabel.

"Well, I hear the gnomes in these parts need a new queen," said Lebam.

"Eeew! Don't do that," said Mabel.

"Better the gnomes than going back to Gideon," said Lebam. "At least they'd love me."

"You're trying to gross me out to make me less mad, aren't you?" asked Mabel.

"Yeah," said Lebam.

"It's sort of working. I mean... I know you don't have anywhere else to go," said Mabel.

"I can't go into foster care with the same fingerprints as you," said Lebam. "You were fingerprinted as part of that child safety thing."

"Nothing really happened... so... I think I just need time to cool down," said Mabel. "I'll spend more time with my new friends, Grenda and Candy, for the next few days."

"All right," said Lebam.

"Now I'm going to see Mermando," said Mabel.

"He really needs help to get home," said Lebam.

"I'll take care of it," said Mabel, a bit stiffly.

***

Late the next afternoon, Mabel was drawing up a plan to make Mermando some legs out of fish sticks and a diving helmet out of a goldfish bowl.

"Hey Mabel, how's it goin'?" asked Grunkle Stan, coming up to her.

"Fine, not doing anything in particular," said Mabel quickly, turning the paper over.

"Listen, I've got a favor to ask you, kid," said Stan. "Could you drive me over to the pool tonight in the Mystery Cart, and then drive it back here? I can't use Soos because he's going off on some crazy scheme of his own, something about liberating pool ducks."

"Why do you need someone to drive you?" asked Mabel.

"I need to get a head start on that little monster, Gideon, for the best deck chair at the pool," said Stan. "But I don't want my vehicle suspiciously parked there when Poolcheck arrives to open the pool in the morning. He might put me in Pool Jail and I'd lose the chair."

"I think I get it," said Mabel. "But won't he be suspicious anyway, with you already there in the chair?"

"I can pretend I don't know about the hole in the fence I'll make, breaking in there. He can't prove I didn't just wander by, see, and walk in through what I thought was a new open gate."

"Okay," said Mabel. "It sounds like the kind of mischief I love... but, one condition."

"Yeah, what's that?" asked Stan.

"You make the hole big enough so I can back the cart in, and then don't look for a few minutes, no questions asked."

"No problem, I'll hide out in the lady's room for a while," said Stan.

"Good idea," said Mabel. "Dipper is going to be on guard there, so don't get caught."

"Don't you get caught, either," said Stan.

"Grunkle Stan, I'm not doing anything. Just helping you get a nice chair at the pool," said Mabel.

***

Mabel did get caught taking pool equipment by Dipper. She had to reveal the truth about Mermando, but she persuaded Dipper to help her free the merman, and she got her first kiss. Lebam was happy for her when she heard about it. They were friends and sisters again.

Later, they both received notes sealed in bottles. 'Mabel' was printed on one side of the rolled notes. On many of the notes, 'Lebam' was printed on the other side of the roll. When the bottle flipped over in the water one might see one name or the other. They shared the notes, except the ones labeled with just one name.


	22. Carpet Lebam

Mabel told Lebam, "I've invited Candy Chiu and Grenda Lipowitz over for a sleepover tonight."

Lebam said, "I guess I can't take part in that. I'll stay out of your way."

"You could come in when we're asleep and prank us if you want," Mabel offered.

"I might just do that," said Lebam.

***

Mabel woke up in a state of confusion, on the floor by Dipper's bed. She had the words "PARTY GURL" written on her forehead.

"Ugh...what happened last night? Whoa!" she said when she saw Candy and her teddy bear taped up to the wall.

"What's up, party girl?" said Candy,

Grenda walked out of the closet, her face covered with red lipstick kisses. She noticed neither of her friends had lipstick on them.

"I don't know what I was kissing in there, but I have no regrets!" Grenda said.

"Candy falls down now," said Candy, working the duct tape loose and falling onto Mabel's bed.

That was awesome, girls. See you again soon!" said Mabel.

***

Lebam woke up in her own closet, her face covered with red lipstick kisses like Grenda's.

She whispered to herself, "I kissed a girl and I liked it."

Lebam was pretty sure she liked guys more, but still, not bad…

She heard Dipper came back in from a rough night outside, and soon he and Mabel were in a fierce argument about splitting up rooms. She listened in. It would be nice if Mabel had her own room. Then they could be secret roommates. But where would they find another bedroom in this place?

***

Soos overheard and decided to "find" the secret hidden room behind a bookcase that he already knew about, and Grunkle Stan said whoever he liked best would get it.

Soos had called out his find before he looked inside the room. Once he did, something about the carpet gave him an uneasy feeling that he couldn't quite put his finger on. (It was Stanley's copy of robot mind-swapping technology, so it didn't look quite the same as the swap carpets Zeus had seen in the past).

He tried to warn the twins, but they ignored him and ran off to suck up to Grunkle Stan for the room. Soos started sweeping up in the room to see if his thoughts would clear. Waddles would come wandering in soon after...

***

The rat who had nanobots from Larry King's wax ear had hidden and stayed cool enough during the summer heat wave to stay undamaged. He was in the newly-opened room when Stan and the kids came in; he scurried and hid under the couch where he could observe. He saw Stan collecting a spare pair of Stanley's glasses from a table near the door. He also noticed the carpet, and realized what it could do. This could be useful...

Lebam texted Mabel and offered to help her. "We'll do twice the suck-up chores and beat Dipper."

"I'll do extra stuff in the kitchen if u do outside," Mabel sent.

"I want inside. U got to cool off in the pool the other day," Lebam sent. "It's ur turn to face the heat."

Lebam started in the kitchen by making some lemonade. She got Mabel to come in and get it to give to Grunkle Stan. This got Mabel ahead by several more points.

Then Lebam cooked an omelet shaped like Stan's head. Her buried memory of the old fez symbol made her decorate the top of the omelet that way.

When Mabel offered it to Stan he took it with great pleasure, and his mood seemed to lift tremendously. (Subconsciously his mind was still not comfortable with the switch the time wave had caused, and seeing the old symbol made him feel better).

Lebam was sure the room would be theirs. She went to the room to look it over, and found Dipper pacing around in his stocking feet. She bragged about the omelet.

"Face it. I'm like a suck-up ninja. This room's as good as mine. You might as well give up now. What do you say?" Lebam put out her hand.

"I say I'm gonna win this room somehow, and when I do I'll finally have my own space... and we'll never have to share anything ever again!" said Dipper.

He slapped her hand; there was a tremendous static shock and both fell back.

Lebam sat up, and looked across the room. "Dipper, why are you wearing my clothes? And my... face? Am I in your body?"

"Am I in your body?" Dipper asked back.

Both screamed. Lebam in Dipper ran into the bathroom to throw up. He/she punched him/herself hard in the stomach with Dipper's left hand, trying to drive herself out of Dipper's body.

"Get out! Get out! Get out!" Lebam in Dipper yelled at him/herself. It didn't work.

They stood together in front of a mirror. It seemed like the asymmetrical pattern of hearts on the sweater was not reversed on the reflection, at least not consistently. Dipper might still have the doppelganger powers of her body! If Mabel changed clothes and he said her name... hopefully that wouldn't happen before she could warn Mabel.

They spent a few moments complaining about being in each others bodies.

"Hey look. Experiment 78," said Dipper in Lebam, turning over a tag on the carpet. "Electron Carpet. Atoms can swap electrons. This carpet must build up a static charge so powerful it can swap minds! It was the static electricity! Maybe we can use it to switch back!"

Lebam in Dipper chuckled. "Glad I'm switching back. If I was you I would totally lose the contest."

"And if I was you, which I am, I could sabotage myself! Then Mabel would lose all her points and the room would go to Dipper!"

"Wait, what?" said Lebam in Dipper.

"Oh Stan! I've always hated you! Ha ha, see who he gives the room to now!" said Dipper in Lebam.

Dipper in Lebam rushed from the room. Lebam in Dipper followed, but pretended to trip on his loose shoelaces. "Tie your shoes!"

When Dipper was out of sight, Lebam got out Dipper's cell phone and texted to Mabel's phone, "Room carpet is magic. I, Lebam swapped bodies with Dip. Hide and don't change clothes K?"

Then she rushed after Dipper, ready to start sabotaging him using his body.

***

Dipper in Lebam had time to make a rock sandwich and offer it to Stan, but Lebam in Dipper caught up by creating chaos in the kitchen. Dipper in Lebam followed suit by getting up on the kitchen table and pouring cereal all over herself/himself.

"Well this is gettin' weird," said Stan. He got up and walked away.

"Wait! Are you gonna dock Mabel points?"

"Dipper should lose all his points!"

They struggled together over who would follow Grunkle Stan for more sabotage.

***

A little while later, both had separated to look for Stan.

"Grunkle Stan, come back! I have more terrible things to do! You're toast, Mabel! That room's as good as mine!" called Dipper in Lebam.

He ran into Grenda and Candy, who had come over for another sleepover.

"There you are, Mabel!" said Grenda.

"Attack her with love!" said Candy.

Grenda hugged Dipper in Lebam and Candy, and carried them both upstairs to the attic bedroom.

Lebam in Dipper chased after them. "Wait, come back! Hey, um, can I talk to my... sister, for a sec?"

"This is a sleepover, buddy. No boys allowed!" said Grenda, shutting the door in Lebam's face.

Lebam in Dipper spied through the keyhole. She/he watched Grenda get out an age-inappropriate werewolf romance novel, Wolfman Bare Chest. Grenda pulled Dipper in Lebam up onto the bed to read it.

Lebam wondered if Grenda thought it was Mabel who kissed her last night, and if she wanted to continue the fun. Dipper was in for an uncomfortable time; it served him right.

Stan came up behind her. "What's going on, Dipper? Ah, you're at that creepy age where you spy on girls, huh? Guess it's time you and me had a man to man talk. About the birds and the bees, you know?"

***

"Look. It all begins with this little fella. The pituitary gland. He may be little but he has BIG PLANS," said Grunkle Stan.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaah!" said Lebam in Dipper.

While Stan read the book Why Am I Sweaty?, Lebam let her mind wander. She already knew quite a bit about the birds and the bees.

She was thinking about the advantages of being a unique individual again. If she never swapped back, she could have her own life. But... could she stand being a guy forever? What was she going to do, date Grenda? And Dipper and Mabel, two of her favorite people, would be stuck sharing a life. She couldn't do that to them.

"And now you know where babies come from!" said Stan at last.

"Goodbye, childhood," whispered Lebam to herself/himself. She meant that she was going to have to take adult responsibility and face being a doppelganger again.

Stan seemed to have enjoyed this bonding time with "Dipper." He said that he was going to give Dipper the room, and nothing Lebam could say seemed to make a difference. He handed the key to "Dipper."

***

She had to wait a while for Dipper to escape from the sleepover party to give him the news.

Dipper came running toward her down the hallway. "Gotta win the room. Stan! It's me, Mabel! I'm doing things you hate!"

"It's over, Dipper. Stan gave you the room," said Lebam, showing the key.

"Ha ha! Yes! Alright!" said Dipper. "Well, let's switch bodies then and I can start moving in."

Lebam didn't like losing. She really wanted that big space instead of the tiny closet she had now.

"Wait a minute. You can't have the room...if you can never get in!" she said. She ran into the room and locked Dipper out. She was still stuck in his body, but she could figure that out later.

***

A little while later, Lebam was trying to write a sign for the room banning girls (or should it be boys?). It was a pleasant surprise to find that the muscle memories of Dipper's ambidextrous hands let her write neatly with her right hand.

She heard Mabel's friends outside. Without thinking, she let them in. Dipper in Lebam pushed in, too.

"Dipper! Wa-wait! Don't let him in here-"

"Makeovers!" called Candy and Grenda.

They grabbed her/him. Too late, she realized Dipper was using them as allies by pretending to be Mabel.

"We're gonna make you SOO hot!" said Grenda.

Lebam protested, but there was nothing she could do to stop them smearing makeup on her/his face.

Dipper added the "final touch" and swapped back. He wiped off the makeup and claimed the room.

"Wait, hold on here. What just happened?" asked Grenda.

Lebam sighed, "I barely understand it. All I know is that if you shuffle your feet on this carpet, you can switch bodies or whatever."

Candy was intrigued and tried the experiment on Dipper.

"I am a boy now! Wassup, bro. Let's grow some mustaches," said Candy.

They all started getting swapped randomly. Then Old Man McGucket and Waddles (with Soos in his body) charged in. More swapping ensued.

Sheriff Blubs, and Deputy Durland came in.

"We've got some reports of excessive gigglin'," said Blubs. (It was the Larry King rat who had placed this call to increase the chaos in the room so he could make his move.)

Everyone got completely swapped around.

Finally, Lebam and Dipper were back in their own bodies. They ran up to the attic room and continued to fight over the key.

"Mabel, the room is mine! Give it to me!" said Dipper.

Lebam was tired of fighting. If she let Dipper have the new room, maybe she and Mabel could find a way to share this old one. She would just have to work out a place to hide when Dipper came in, maybe in the closet.

"What's with you? Why do you need that room so bad? I never even wanted to move out!" said Lebam.

"Me either," said Dipper.

"Then what was all this?" asked Lebam.

He explained it was because Grenda and Candy were over all the time and he felt left out. Lebam could sympathize with that completely.

"Here. I won't fight you for it," said Lebam. (She threw him the key with her right hand since he would expect that, but it was a short, underhand toss that was easy to make).

***

Later, in the hidden room, Mabel said, "Well it looks like everyone's back to normal... Except for Soos, who may be a pig permanently?"

Soos was chewing on the door frame, like a rat rather than a pig.

He suddenly straightened up. "Oh no, I changed back. At least I think I did."

Later, Dipper got Grunkle Stan to take the carpet out and get rid of it.

***

That night, the original Mabel was lonely for Dipper. So was Dipper for Mabel. He went back to the attic room and asked for a sleepover. They agreed to share the old attic room and let Soos have the new room for a break room.

Lebam was back in her tiny closet. She would have liked more space, but there was no way to get it. She couldn't keep this up; something was going to have to change soon.

***

"Soos" was having trouble with a woman that Waddles had apparently made love to in this body. This was a tough acting job for the Wax Larry King rat, now in the body of Soos (the real Soos was stuck in the rat's body). It seemed that the brain in this body really did cause confusion to whoever wore it, too.

"I just don't think I can do this anymore, you just seem so different," said the woman, crying.

"Look dude, I'm playing a little bit of catch-up here. I was in a pig's body for most of the day. W-what's goin' on?" said Larry, playing Soos.

The woman looked at him.

"Can we kiss again, i-is that an option?" asked Larry.

He grabbed for her and she dug her nails into his arm. What would Soos say in this situation? Oh yes... say what Soos said when the rat overheard him trying to fit into the hot pipes in the old break room.

"Ow, wait wait."


	23. Crazy for Boyz

To have more to do while she was hiding, Lebam had found a way to tap into the security cameras of the Mystery Shack gift shop. She saw Dipper and Wendy watching old security camera footage and supplying their own fake voice-overs, which made them laugh together.

Lebam saw Mabel sneak up on them, and dance happily. She saw Mabel make a strong, accurate throw of a calendar at Dipper with her right hand (something Lebam would have trouble doing with that hand). She remembered why Mabel was happy: tonight was the Sev'ral Timez concert that Mabel had been going on about. Lebam wished she could go. She shared Mabel's infatuation with the boy band.

Grenda and Candy came in, carrying Sev'ral Timez items. They huddled and laughed together and then disappeared into the "Employees Only" section.

Lebam sighed. It was a lonely life, being a doppelganger.

***

That evening, after the concert, Lebam heard Mabel, Grenda, and Candy pushing something heavy up the stairs.

She heard Dipper say, "Hey, guys. How was the concert, and what's in the bag?"

"Uh... money! Money we stole!" said Mabel.

"We are criminals! We will cut you!" said Candy.

"Let's go away from here now," said Mabel.

Lebam listened in from her closet as Mabel and her friends bumped the bag upstairs and unpacked the what sounded like the complete Sev'ral Timez band in her room: Greggy C, Creggy G, Leggy P, Chubby Z, and Deep Chris!

Lebam found she could tell them apart easily with her llama hearing, by subtle differences in their voices.

"Your tour bus is really strange, Mabel girl. Where the feedin' tubes at?" said Leggy P.

Lebam wondered what he meant about the feeding tubes. Probably Leggy just meant he was hungry, in boy-band lingo. It was so awesome to have them all right nearby.

"Yo what up, girl?" said Deep Chris, and Waddles oinked in reply.

"So, when do we get to go outside?" asked Creggy G.

"I wanna cavort like a woodland creature!" said Chubby Z.

They were going on a date in the woods, to cavort like woodland creatures! It sounded heavenly to Lebam. She wanted to follow them, and to demand Mabel to let her swap in.

A car screeched to a stop outside, and Lebam heard bits of a conversation between an angry man and Soos.

***

Ergman Bratsman got out of the limo. Soos (aka the Wax Larry King rat) was there to intercept him.

This had taken the judicious use of the time machine that Larry had discovered on Soos' tool belt. Larry had heard from Stan that Mabel and her friends had been arrested for kidnapping Sev'ral Timez. (Bratsman had stormed into the house and caught the girls, dooming them to life sentences in adult prison. Lebam was also caught when they searched the house, and she would have been sentenced with them.)

Soos would normally be at his Abuelita's house, since it was after business hours, but now he was there with a watering can, justifying his presence by watering a wildflower near the Mystery Shack. Bratsman stepped on it.

"I can't believe those boys escaped from their cage," said Bratsman. "You there! I found this trail of frosted tips leading to this very location. Have you seen any perfect boys around here?"

"Only when I look in the mirror. Ha ha, up top!" said Soos.

Bratsman declined to give him a high-five, so Soos did it for himself with his other hand.

"They must be around here somewhere! I'll find those boys if I have to turn this town upside down!" said Bratsman.

Soos watched him go. He had only delayed the arrest, unless he did something more. The "BIG MONEY" license plate, with its sticker showing a paid-up registration to 2013, gave him an idea.

He snapped back in time a few minutes, and found the last time when Bratsman and his driver had stopped the limo and were looking for frosted tips by the side of the road with flashlights. He sneaked up and removed the top registration sticker. Now the plate had the number 2012 instead, an expired registration when the month was taken into account.

Replaying the scene, Soos realized the change was too subtle and it would not get Bratsman in enough trouble. The police would just look up the registration and the car would be found to be paid up.

After Bratsman left again, the control program in Larry/Soos sent a message to the control program in Gompers over the reverse time channel. The goat came and joined him, in time to chew off the rear license plate (now with the year 2012 on it instead of 2013). Soos could call the police anonymous tip line and get Bratsman arrested for driving without a rear license plate.

That should keep Mabel and her hidden boy-band slaves safe for a while, long enough for the completion of the ceremony, at least. Then they could arrest her if they wanted – it wouldn't matter. (He wasn't sure that the outcome could be avoided, since he had used time-travel to fix it.)

"Good boy," Soos told Gompers.

(The bogus Soos was not aware of the irony of using this goat, which was a gender-flipped android copy with the personality of Amalthea, a nanny goat who had been used to guard the newly-created robot Zeus when his father Chronos was looking to devour him. The goat copy retained the broken-off horn that Zeus had inflicted in play. It also retained a loyalty program to Zeus that could override the control program Bill Cipher had placed in it, when the time was right.)

***

Meanwhile, Mabel peeked out the window and then explained to the band that it wasn't safe to go out, that their producer was out there looking for them.

"Don't worry, guys. He has to give up eventually. Hey... in the meantime you guys can stay here with us!"

The band chattered happily.

"All right, twenty-thirteen!" said Chubby Z.

Lebam wondered what this meant, since 2013 was next year. It was probably boy-band talk for "Things are going well."

"Girls, do you realize what's happening here? We have our very own pet boy band that we can do whatever we want with!" said Lebam.

Candy said, "Remember, eventually we will have to let them go. We have to promise not to get too attached to them. Right, Mabel? Mabel?"

"All aboard the braid train! Braid braid!" called Mabel.

Lebam was almost sick with excitement and jealousy, but soon Mabel slipped away and came to her.

"Lebam, the boys are clones. They've been raised in a giant hamster cage and they don't know anything about the real world. They're going to stay with us and we'll teach them about life."

"Woop woop! May I please get in on this?" asked Lebam.

"Oh course. It's going to take a lot of work and I'll need your help," said Mabel. "We can tag team."

"Now? May I swap in now?" asked Lebam.

"Oh!" said Mabel. "Umm..."

"Pleeeease," said Lebam.

"All right... I guess...," said Mabel.

Lebam went out while Mabel stayed in the closet. Lebam, Grenda, and Candy staged a sleep-over and locked Dipper out; he slept in Soos' new break room. The girls didn't take advantage of the clones that night... much.

The next morning, Lebam, Grenda, and Candy listened to a live performance, hid on the ceiling when Stan nearly caught them, tried to teach the clones to drink water from a glass, and did a boy-riding race down the hall.

It ended with Sev'ral Timez giving Lebam a group hug. Candy and Grenda moved forward; they wanted to join in.

"Just—oh- just a few more minutes," said Lebam.

"But.." said Grenda.

Lebam's animal instincts were aroused. She hissed at them and pawed with her left hand.

***

Grenda and Candy left soon after that. Dipper was occupied all day with some sort of record-making project for Grunkle Stan, so he was out of the way. Lebam got Mabel out of the closet.

"This room isn't very comfortable to sleep in," said Mabel.

"Tell me about it," said Lebam.

"I want to swap back now," said Mabel.

"I've been thinking, and I want the boys to know about both of us," said Lebam. "It's too crazy-making to have two sets of hidden clones here if one set doesn't know about the other."

"You're right," said Mabel.

They walked into Mabel's bedroom together. The Sev'ral Timez clones didn't seem surprised at all.

"Yo, Mabel and Mabel," said Leggy P.

"You knew?" asked Mabel.

"Sure," said Chubby Z, going over to Lebam and sniffing her hair. "This Mabel smells more like a furry woodland creature."

Lebam grinned. "I'm part llama."

"Since you both go by the same name, could we call the animal one 'Mabel dog' and the other one 'Mabel girl'?" asked Deep Chris.

"Works for me," said Lebam. There was no point in teaching them her real name; they might slip up and use it in front of Grenda and Candy.

Lebam and Mabel spent a great afternoon with the boys. Towards evening, Candy and Grenda came over again, so Lebam moved back into hiding while the three friends continued their fun with the clones.

When it got late, Mabel suggested the other two go downstairs to watch TV in the kitchen while she got the boys down for some sleep. Lebam came back in after Grenda and Candy were gone, and the two of them did some more cuddling with the boys (the sleep plan was a lie).

After a short while, Mabel left Lebam with Sev'ral Timez while she went down to talk with her friends. Lebam kept half of her keen llama hearing tuned to the conversation below so she could be ready to slip back into the closet if the friends decided to come upstairs again.

"How'd it go up there?" Grenda asked Mabel.

"Oh, I finally got them to sleep. Poor Greggy C. He tried to eat a tape dispenser," said Mabel. "Ah, memories."

A news report came on that the boy-band king, Ergman Bratsman, had been arrested for driving in Gravity Falls without a rear license plate.

The news ended with, "...He is now in county jail, awaiting trial."

"Yes!" said Grenda.

"We have to tell the boys they are free now," said Candy.

Mabel laughed nervously, no doubt worried about what Lebam would think of that. With good reason.

"Let's go!" said Candy, and both she and Grenda rushed up the stairs giggling, leaving Mabel behind.

Instead of slipping into the closet, Lebam slipped out of the bedroom and hid behind a couple of boxes in the main room of the attic. She had to head them off! There were no other stairs up to the attic, so she charged as soon as they passed the boxes and hoped they would believe Mabel ran up the stairs behind them at incredible speed.

Grenda and Candy gasped when they saw her charge in front of the door to bar their way, but they didn't think to ask questions.

"Not so fast! They're not going anywhere!" said Lebam.

"What's the dealio, Mabel? That evil producer is gone. We have to tell the boys," Grenda said.

"Wait, girls," said Lebam. "Let's not be so hasty. I mean, think about it. If we don't tell the boys, then they can stay here with me—I mean, with us."

Grenda said, "Mabel, we can't keep them here forever."

Lebam said, "But I love them."

Candy said, "If you loved them, you'd set them free."

"Never!" said Lebam. "Every boy I've loved this summer has left me! And I'm not gonna let it happen again!" Vlad the vampire and Mermando were in her mind (as well as the two Dipper clones).

"Candy, we gotta get past Mabel. She's gone boy crazy!" said Grenda.

Lebam panted and snarled, "Boys!"

Candy charged, "Candy, attack!"

Candy's small size made her surprisingly agile, and Lebam was tackled through the door before she could fight back.

The boys looked up, startled. Mabel's lie about getting them to sleep was exposed.

"You guys, Ergman Bratsman is in jail! You're free!" said Grenda.

"Just go!" said Candy.

"Woah! Is that true, Mabel dog?" asked Creggy G.

"Uh, no! Your producer's still out there! You're gonna have to stay here, probably forever!" said Lebam.

"What! You can't listen to her!" said Grenda.

Deep Chris said, "Mabel's our girl, girl. She puts pizza in our food trough."

Chubby Z said, "She changes my newspaper, yo. She's aiight."

Grenda said, "She is not aiight, Chubby Z!"

Lebam pulled herself out from under Candy and marched over to the band members.

"Sev'ral Timez!" she said.

"Yes, Mabel dog?" said the clones in unison.

"Remove these two from the premises, please," said Lebam. She pointed at the girls and snapped the fingers of her left hand.

The clones moved forward, snapping their fingers.

"Oh no, they're aggressively dancing at us!" said Grenda.

The clones picked up Candy and Grenda.

"Mabel's gone mad with power. Save yourselves, Sev'ral Timez! You were better off with your producer!" Grenda said.

The clones tossed Mabel's friends out, then turned to pose.

"Word!" said Deep Chris.

Grenda stuck her head back in. "Call me, Deep Chris!"

Leggy P kicked the door back shut.

"Twenty-thirteen!" said Chubby Z.

"Thank you boys," said Lebam with a sigh. "Now let's get aboard the braid train."

Deep Chris said, "Things just got pretty heavy, Mabel. Maybe we should just like, chill for a minute and-"

"I said, let's get aboard the BRAID TRAIN!" said Lebam.

***

A little while later, Mabel came back up with a chocolate milk for herself and Lebam, and they talked in the attic room. Dipper and Grunkle Stan had driven off somewhere, so they were safe to meet openly.

"I'm feeling a little guilty," said Mabel. "Did we really have to kick out my friends?"

"Yes, we did," said Lebam. "They were going to ruin everything."

"But what will we do about a sleeping place for the boys, now?" asked Mabel. "We don't have the sleepover party as an excuse anymore."

"We couldn't have kept that up forever anyway," said Lebam. "What we should do is kick Soos out of his new break room, at least at night. He was okay with his old break room. The boys can sleep in there, I'll sleep there too to keep them company, and you can keep Dipper company in your room."

"Lebam!" said Mabel.

"We can spend every other night in their room, okay?" said Lebam.

"I still feel we're doing the wrong thing," said Mabel.

"We're not," said Lebam. "I have my reasons."

"You may be right, but I want to go in and talk to them, find out how they really feel about all this," said Mabel. "I won't spill the beans, I promise."

She went in, and Lebam heard the band singing an original song to her, Mabel Girl, ending with;

Other folks we could never trust/We know/That you'd never lie to us/Mabel girl/We know you love us SoOoOo

Then she heard Mabel say, "That's why I have to let you go."

***

They bedded the boys down in the new break room, and Lebam went back to her closet that night. She barely spoke to Mabel the rest of that evening.

Early the next morning, Mabel went to get the boys to set them free. Lebam intercepted her at the door to their room.

"You and your friends are cruel," said Lebam. "What do you think you're doing? The boys aren't ready to live in the wild. They can't even tell a tape dispenser from food, for crying out loud."

"But isn't it worse to keep them prisoners by lies?" asked Mabel.

"You took them out of a place where they were at least provided for," said Lebam. "It's like stealing someone's pet. Now you're responsible for them."

"They were slaves. They need to be free," said Mabel.

"I've been a slave, so I get that. But I escaped by myself; I can take care of myself. They're completely ignorant, babes in the woods," said Lebam.

"Now they know it's possible to go, they won't want to stay. We can't keep them prisoners against their will," said Mabel.

"Which is why you should have kept lying to them," said Lebam.

"It's too late now," said Mabel.

"Yes, it is. Which is why, when you let them go, I'm going with them," said Lebam.

"No! Lebam, you can't. I won't let you," said Mabel.

"I'm your prisoner?" asked Lebam.

"Of course not. You're my twin sister and I love you," said Mabel.

"Then you need to let me go. I have to help Sev'ral Timez survive in the wild." said Lebam.

"How can you do that? What will you eat?" asked Mabel.

"I can survive on leaves and grass. The problem is the boys. I think I'll start by teaching them how to raid trash cans, like raccoons," said Lebam.

"Oh Lebam, that's no life for a kid. You're twelve years old," said Mabel.

"A lot of women my age have to grow up fast, all around the world," said Lebam. "I've already said goodbye to my childhood. I had to, really, from the moment I was pulled from the mirror into this world."

"We've had fun, being together here," said Mabel.

"Yes, but this isn't really my life, it's yours. I've found my life's calling now," said Lebam.

"And you get the boys," said Mabel.

"Yes, I get the boys," said Lebam. "Woop! Woop!"

"You're my dear twin sister," said Mabel. "I wish you could stay."

"I'm not your twin sister. I'm a mirror doppelganger, a Gravity Falls monster, and it's time I lived in the woods like one," said Lebam.

"You're no monster, Lebam," said Mabel. "You're good."

"I'm a good monster, one that loves you, your brother, your Grunkle, Waddles, and everyone here very much, and I'll miss you terribly," said Lebam.

She began to sob, and Mabel hugged her, sobbing too.

"Will I see you again?" Mabel asked.

"I'll visit. I'd like to come back and do a goodbye party with Waddles in a few days, after I find a place to settle with the boys."

"We'll do a pig dance party, where you dance with Waddles, and I'll take a video to remember you by," said Mabel.

"That would be good," said Lebam. "Awesome even."

***

Candy and Grenda walked up to the main entrance of the Mystery Shack.

"We've gotta save the boys," said Grenda.

"I'm prepared to defend myself," said Candy, holding up her Sev'ral Timez finger extension hands.

Mabel opened the door, and apologized for going bonkers. Grenda and Candy were prepared to forgive her: friendship was restored.

Sev'ral Timez came out and looked around in confusion.

"What's going on, Mabel girl?" asked Leggy P.

"You said you had something you wanted to show us or some deal?" said Chubby Z.

"Yup. This!" said Mabel, gesturing to the outdoors and the rising sun.

Chubby Z was annoyed by the bright sun and tried to stare it down; he soon gave up and rubbed his eyes.

"Yo, yo, hold up. What's this big green mess?" asked Deep Chris.

"That's nature, Deep Chris. Bratsman won't bother you anymore. You can do anything you wanna do, go anywhere you wanna go. You're free!" said Mabel.

"Far-ee?" asked Chubby Z.

"Free! You're free! It means you can skedaddle!" said Mabel, picking up a stick to urge them on. "Now go! Go!"

The boys still hesitated.

"Get out of here before I change my mind!" said Mabel.

They sang out "Goodbye, girl," before stepping into the bushes.

A few steps into the bushes, they found Lebam waiting. "Hi guys, meet your new pack leader. I'm going with you to help you survive in the wild."

"Mabel dog," said Chubby Z. "You're aiight."

Back on the porch of the Mystery Shack, Lebam heard Candy say, "They won't last a week."

Lebam glared back in her direction and gave an angry hiss. "No thanks to you, Candy, we will."

***

Sev'ral Timez performed one of their songs in the woods:

Girl you always actin' so cray cray/CRAY CRAY/You tell me that you won't be my bay-bay/We're non-threatening girl/yeah

The deer they were singing to looked at them, then leaped away, startled.

Creggy G was kissing a tree.

"Dang girl," he said, "Twenty-thirteen."

Lebam stepped out from behind another tree, with one of Grunkle Stan's hunting rifles in her hand.

"Less noise making out with trees next time, Creggy G," said Lebam. "We nearly had venison tonight."


	24. Pig Dance Party

Mabel said, "Finally, Waddles, we have the whole house to ourselves! What do you think? Dance party?"

Waddles oinked.

"I'm not hearing a no!" said Mabel.

Mabel flipped the sign on the gift shop door to "Closed," turned off the security camera, and turned up the radio.

Lebam came out of hiding from the "Employees Only" door.

"The whole house to ourselves?" she asked.

"I was including you, of course. This party's for you," said Mabel.

"A chance to say a real goodbye to Waddles," said Lebam.

"I wanted to ask you first, how are you and the Sev'ral Timez clones making out in the woods?"

"We're making out just fine," said Lebam. "Sev'ral timez a day."

Both of them giggled.

"You're getting enough food?" Mabel asked.

"It was tough at first. It's hard to find food for five guys with just hunting, gathering, and trash can raiding," said Lebam.

"What did you do?" asked Mabel.

"I thought of a better idea. Remember the ghosts of Ma and Pa Duskerton?" asked Lebam.

"Ye-ees," said Mabel uneasily.

"The Duskertons hate rap, but they love soft pop music. Basically we have a long-term gig: we keep the ghosts entertained and they supply us with free food. They can restock the store with their ghostly powers," said Lebam.

"Awesome! Are you in the band now?" asked Mabel.

"Yes, they've taught me to sing backup," said Lebam.

"You seem happy," said Mabel.

"With five gorgeous guys at my beck and call? I'm in heaven," said Lebam.

"Are they learning enough to get along better in the world?" Mabel asked.

"It's a slow process. There's so much they need to learn," said Lebam.

"You know what we should do?" said Mabel. "We should make some guide-to-life videos about all sorts of stuff. You could borrow my laptop and show them to the guys."

"Yes, let's do that," said Lebam. "Later this summer."

"Well, let's this dance party started," said Mabel. She set up a video camera on a tripod, and used an instant-photo flash camera besides that.

Lebam danced with Waddles, recreating moves from the song "We are Not Alone" from "The Breakfast Club. They both ate grape popsicles off the floor. Lebam liked that flavor a lot; they were a variety that Dusk 2 Dawn didn't have.

When they finished the popsicles, Mabel shut off the camera.

"Lebam, you're covered with purple juice," Mabel said. "We need to stop and clean you up. I hope those sweater stains will come out."

"Mabel," said Lebam, and she was instantly cleaned by her clothing-reflection power. "Now we just need to mop the floor and wipe up Waddles."

The dance continued after that. Lebam squished Waddles' face into a smile. She took a selfie with Waddles on the floor, with both wearing sunglasses.

Mabel stopped the video camera again. "I don't think you'll get the best angle with a selfie. Let me do one for you. Cross your arms: it will look cuter that way."

Lebam let her take the shot. When the photo came out, Mabel wrote "BFFS" on it with a Sharpie.

"I'll keep this to remember my two best friends in the whole world," said Mabel.

"Better than Grenda and Candy?" asked Lebam.

"I'm a bit angry at them right now," said Mabel. "When Candy said the guys wouldn't last a week, I would have yelled for them to come back if I didn't know they had you to look after them."

"So heartless," said Lebam. "I don't think I can ever forgive her."

"I'm going to try," said Mabel. "I still need friends."

"May I have something more to eat?" asked Lebam. "This dancing is making me hungry. But not anything sugary."

"There's no food but popsicles for sale in the gift shop," said Mabel. "I'll get you something from the kitchen."

"You might get in trouble for raiding the fridge. I see an outdated phone book in the trash that I can eat with my llama digestion," said Lebam. "There's another discarded book in here for Waddles."

They each ate a book, and then danced on top of the counter. They danced more on the floor and Lebam posed Waddles like her.

Finally she folded herself to the floor like Molly Ringwald in "The Breakfast Club," saying "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...yes...yes."

Waddles licked Lebam's fingers.

"Uh oh! Cuddle time!" said Lebam, and Waddles cuddled with her on the floor.

"Waddles, can I tell you a secret? You're my favorite pig in the whole world," said Lebam. She yawned and fell asleep.

Mabel let her nap. "She must be exhausted taking care of all those boys," she thought.

When she heard Grunkle Stan at the gift shop door, Mabel slipped into the "Employees Only" section and hid. Stan was counting money and didn't see Lebam and Waddles on the floor, and he tripped over them.

"Aah! Mabel? What are ya doing on the floor?" asked Stan.

"Being cute and great!" said Lebam. She squished her face together with Waddles.

Stan said something about Dipper being weird, and Lebam responded with an imitation of Dipper, revealing his secret that he kissed a pillow with Wendy's face on it, which made Stan laugh.

Stan looked down and saw Waddles chewing on his pants leg.

"Go, go! Chew that pant leg!" said Lebam.

"Ugh!" said Stan. "All right. Outside! Now!"

Lebam said, "No! Grunkle Stan! It's not safe for Waddles outside! There's predators! And barbecuers."

Stan said, "That's just the natural order! It's not my fault your pig's potentially delicious!"

They argued a bit more about it. Finally Lebam said, "Maybe we're the ones who should be put outside. Huh? Huh? Think about it! Hmph!"

Lebam left the gift shop through the employee's door and joined Mabel in the TV room. Stan would be tied up in the gift shop for a while, so they could talk.

"Did you hear that? The old meanie wants to put Waddles outside with the predators," said Lebam.

"I won't let that happen," said Mabel.

"You'd better not," said Lebam. "If anything happens to Waddles I'll never speak to you again."

"Speaking of predators, how is it living outdoors?" Mabel asked. "Are predators and monsters a problem for you at night?"

"My llama senses help me detect them," said Lebam. "We sleep in a big puppy pile at night for warmth, with me in the middle. If I scent or hear any danger we dance at it aggressively; that makes most animals back off. If I have to I can fight by kickboxing."

"Llamas are nature's greatest warriors," said Mabel. "That's what Dipper told me when I was choosing the sweater that eventually became part of you."

"I remember that," said Lebam. "He used a funny voice when he said it, like Larry King."

***

Unknown to them, the current incarnation of Wax Larry King, Soos, was listening from an adjoining room.

"It was actually me," Larry King thought. "All according to Bill Cipher's plan."

He revisited his complicated history in a series of flashbacks.

Bill was the source of the nanobots that brought the wax figures to life. They were planted in a garage where Stan Pines would find them, and buy them for his new Mystery Shack curiosity museum. Stan stole them, which worked just as well.

The tourists had become bored with them. Stan locked them away for ten years, and the door to the room was eventually wallpapered over. That made them useless as spies, until eventually the real Soos had opened their room again.

They had wanted to kill Stan for revenge, but that had failed due to the incompetence of their leader, Wax Sherlock Holmes. The Pines Twins discovered their secret, and the figures had tried to kill them and failed. The control program in Gompers was angry, but he was able to turn the situation back to their advantage, when Larry's head managed to slip through a loose air vent cover and find a hiding place.

A rat took one of his ears, and that was also good. As long as their wax was unmelted, the nanobots in the wax figures retained control of them, like the arm that attacked Mabel after she detached it. When the rat ate the wax, Larry took over its mind.

Soon after, Mabel was choosing sweaters in front of a mirror near where Larry was watching. Under orders from Gompers, he suggested the llama sweater. Gompers told him later that this would allow a clone with special powers to be brought to life, and when that happened the Llama would be added to Cipher's Ring. Bill could choose up to ten people he could project dreams to (or control given permission) through his Ring channels, changing them at will. Thanks to a time loop-back, all old drawings of the Ring were also updated, including the one in the missing Journal 2.

During the hottest day of the summer, the original Wax Larry King head had melted in the vents, but the copy in the rat had found a cooler place to hide, sneaking through cracks into the basement.

Larry had been able to take advantage of the confusion with the mind-swapping carpet to swap the mind in his rat self with Soos. Gompers and Larry had begun to suspect something was not right with the handyman. He was in too many of the right places at the right time, and they had even discovered a time-travel device on him, too. Soos, as the rat, was in hiding somewhere. They would find and kill him in time, Larry thought.

As Soos, Larry had headed off Bratsman from finding his escaped Sev'ral Timez clones. He had even gotten the producer arrested, saving Mabel and Lebam from life imprisonment; this was all for Bill's purposes.

***

Meanwhile, Lebam was taking her leave of Mabel and Waddles, giving them big hugs.

"Bye, BFFs. I have to get back to the boys," said Lebam. "I love you forever."

"I love you forever too, Leeb," said Mabel.

"Not forever," thought the evil Larry King. "Darkness is coming."


	25. Nightmares and Dreamscaperers

The rest of the day after the Pig Dance Party was life as normal. Mabel went out and bought a Huggy Wuvvy Tummy Bundle for Waddles, and when she came back her pig was doing fine. (Stan had put Waddles out in the yard, but hastily returned him to the house before Mabel got back).

Mabel began planning her "Guide to Life" series for the Sev'ral Timez clones. She had all sorts of things they could learn: about stickers, art, fashion, and even dating. (She wasn't sure Lebam would let the boys see that one, but it would still be fun to make),

One day, Mabel led Dipper out into the woods.

"Dipper, I have someone I'd like you to meet," she told him. "You're going to be so surprised!"

"A vampire boyfriend?" asked Dipper.

Lebam stepped out from behind a tree. "Nope, I'm her mirror doppelganger girlfriend, Lebam Senip. Well, a friend who's a girl, a friend friend, you know."

"Yaah!" said Dipper. He backed away from the clone.

"She was secretly staying with us and sometimes trading places with me, but now she has her own life in the woods, so it's safe to tell you about her," said Mabel.

"I've read about doppelgangers: they're evil monsters. They want to kill you and take your place," said Dipper.

"Not this one," said Mabel. "Lebam's a good monster."

"I stayed hidden in the attic closet of the Mystery Shack, from the time Gideon was trying to date Mabel, when he pulled me from a mirror with a magic spell, to when she and Grenda and Candy... were having sleepovers," said Lebam. She decided that Dipper didn't need to know about Sev'ral Timez.

"If she had wanted to kill me, she had plenty of opportunities," said Mabel.

"I remember some funny business I couldn't explain," said Dipper. "I thought you were just being weird for fun. Like you do."

"Like I do," said Mabel with a grin.

"But sometimes it was me being weird," said Lebam. "Or serious. I saved your life from Gideon when he tried to kill you in the warehouse."

"That was you?" asked Dipper.

"Yep," said Lebam. "Beep boop!"

"Thank you," said Dipper. "I guess you're all right, Lebam."

"Now you have two twin sisters to torment you," said Mabel with a laugh. "Let's get fun sticks and poke him, Leeb."

"I'm ahead of you there, sister," said Lebam, producing her own fun stick from behind her back.

"No! No!" said Dipper, running from them but secretly enjoying it.

Later, they made several videos with Lebam's help. In one scene, Lebam held a cardboard cutout boy, "Zack" outside the kitchen window while Dipper filmed Mabel talking to the "boy" from inside, at the kitchen table. She also showed how she could eat leaves, but they shouldn't, in a "Guide to Eating Non-Foods."

Grenda and Candy were let in on the secret eventually (when they made more videos using them) but not Grunkle Stan. They still didn't trust him not to exploit Lebam as a Mystery Shack exhibit. Lebam was finally able to forgive Mabel's two friends, since things had turned out so well for her.

Mabel and Lebam also helped Dipper make a couple more "Guide to the Unexplained" videos to add to his series. It was Lebam who held the camera and captured footage of the Floating Island Head Monster when Mabel and Dipper were both rowing for their lives. Lebam also got the first-ever footage of the Hide Behind (when Dipper was walking away after he was fooled by the rattling sound of the Maraca Owl). It took Lebam for a fellow monster, so it wasn't bothered by being seen by her.

***

One evening a strange ad for Gideon's Tent o' Telepathy came on, promising that it would open in a new location, the Mystery Shack.

"Uh, should we be worried about that?" asked Dipper.

"Please, the only way Gideon's taking over the shack is by breaking in and stealing my deed," said Stan.

There was a crash from Stan's office.

"You mean like, right now?" asked Wendy.

They found Gideon trying to break into the safe by guessing the combination.

"Well, well, Stanford, my arch-nemesis," said Gideon. "We seem to have entered a dangerous game of cat and mouse. But the question remains, who is the cat, and who is the..."

Stan shooed him out with a broom, into the rain.

Gideon shook his fist. "You mark my words, Stanford, one day I'm gonna get that combination. And once I steal that deed, you'll never see the Mystery Shack again!"

Stan said, "Good luck, bucko!"

Gideon sneaked back to the window of Stan's office and watched him re-locking the safe.

Stan laughed. "The combo to this safe is in the one place he'll never find it: my brain."

Gideon said, "Your brain isn't as safe as you might think, Stanford Pines!"

He walked into the woods and got out his Journal 2. "This is the last straw! It's time to unlock the journal's greatest secret..." said Gideon.

Gideon looked up the instructions for summoning a dream demon, and walked to the birch woods where every tree had eye-like markings.

"You think that combination's safe in your mind, Stanford? We'll see what my new minion has to say about that!" said Gideon.

He began to chant the summoning formula, "Triangulum, entangulum. Veneforis dominus ventium. Veneforis venetisarium!"

Mabel and Soos had gone outside and followed the sound of Gideon's voice. They hid in the bushes and watched what he was doing.

"...backwards message, backwards message, backwards message," said Gideon, and there was a sense of time flowing in reverse.

***

Bill Cipher was still desperately seeking the lost Journal 2, following yet another lead to where Ruth Pines might have been staying when she was in hiding. The summoning signal caught him by surprise.

"Holy smokes!" Bill said. "The bat signal!"

He flew as quickly as possible back to Gravity Falls, and then went back in time to reach the summoner. It was L'il Gideon!

Bill turned on his dream projector, which reached everyone in range who was on his channel Ring with the same dream. The background turned black-and-white as the dream began, except for his hovering yellow triangular self.

"Oh, oh, Gravity Falls! It is good to be back. Name's Bill Cipher, and I take it you're some kind of living ventriloquist dummy? Ha ha, I'm just kidding, I know who you are, Gideon!"

It was so good to be back here, back on track. For Gideon must have Journal 2, or have gotten the summoning information from someone who did.

Gideon said, "W-what are you? H-how do you know my name?"

Bill said, "Oh, I know lots of things!"

Bill projected various mysterious locations in the past on his body, related to the Time Baby's interventions in human history.

"Lots of things..." he said in his slow, deep mode.

Bill was so happy that he wanted to reward this kid.

"What could I give him?" Bill thought. "Animal ivories are valuable to humans, right? I once gave some to McGucket, and he was really pleased with them."

"Hey, look what I can do!" said Bill. He gestured toward a deer, which opened its mouth to let its teeth fly into Bill's hands; he dropped the teeth into Gideon's hands.

"Deer teeth! For you, kid!"

Gideon gasped and dropped the teeth on the ground. "You're insane!"

Apparently, this wasn't a gift Gideon appreciated. Oh well... He put the teeth back.

"Sure I am," said Bill. "what's your point?"

Gideon said, "Listen to me, demon! I have a job for you. I need you to enter the mind of Stanford Pines and steal the code to his safe."

"Wait... Stan Pines?" Bill turned his back, and put up a picture of Stanley Pines as Bill last saw him, just before he jumped into the portal.

Could Pines have returned from another dimension, and shared secrets from the lost Journal with this boy? No, wait... he said "Stanford Pines." That was the alias of Samuel Pines, who had taken Bill's secret tattoo... Even better. He even had full permission to enter his mind.

"You know what, kid?" said Bill. "You've convinced me! I'm sold! I'll help you with this and in return you can help me with something I've been working on! We'll work out the details later."

Gideon said, "Deal!"

As they shook hands, their hands were surrounded by blue flames.

"This is so, so sweet," thought Bill. "The Journal is as good as mine, at long last. No more fear of Robot Tartarus for me!"

"Well, time to invade Stan's mind!" Bill said aloud. "This should be fun! Remember, reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram, buy gold, bye!"

These random remarks were a way of looking at advanced portal physics. The "buy gold" was a reminder to prepare for the coming economic collapse. Gideon deserved the tip for being so helpful to Bill.

Bill cloaked himself and ended the dream for his receiver.

Gideon woke and said, "It worked!" He laughed like a maniac.

***

Mabel and Soos went to warn Dipper. Soos (with the mind of the evil Wax Larry King) wanted to go along to help Bill, so he stuck close to Mabel. He managed to distract her into raiding the kitchen for snacks on the way, to buy Bill a little time.

Soos said, "This evil triangle guy said he's gonna break into Stan's mind and steal the combination to his safe! Also we stopped for snacks on the way here."

"Triangle guy?" said Dipper, taking out Journal 3. "I feel like I've seen something like this before in the journal... Beware Bill, the most powerful and dangerous creature I've ever encountered. Whatever you do, never let him enter your mind."

Mabel said, "Grunkle Stan!" as she saw a triangular shadow merging into Stan.

Mabel took Journal 3 and read aloud, "It is possible to follow the demon into a person's mind and prevent his chaos. One must simply recite this incantation."

"Ugh, this is just great," said Dipper. "I spend all day cleaning sinks and fighting bats for Stan and now I have to save him from some crazy brain demon?"

Mabel said, "But if we don't do anything Gideon might steal the shack! Or worse!"

Dipper reluctantly agreed and he recited the code phrases that would allow them to enter Stan's dream along with Bill.

Soos played ignorant and said he would take his Burrito Bites along, but naturally he knew nothing physical would come into the dreamscape with them.

***

The three walked through a weird, distorted dreamscape of the yard outside the Mystery Shack. Soon they saw the triangular guy on the porch; Mabel tried to jump him only to find herself ejected seconds later with no memory of time passing.

Bill said, "Ah, Stan's family, we meet at last! Question Mark, Shooting Star, Pine Tree. I had a hunch I might bump into you!"

He raised a finger and shot a hole in Dipper's chest. Dipper screamed.

Mabel demonstrated that the hole had done no real harm by sticking her hand through it. "Boop!"

Dipper said, "Mabel!" Then, to Bill: "What do you want with our uncle's mind anyway?"

"Oh, just the code to the old man's safe," said Bill. "Inside the shack is a maze of a thousand doors representing your uncle's memories. Behind one of them is a memory of him inputting the code. I just need to find it and Gideon will pay me handsomely."

Mabel said, "Not if we stop you!"

Bill said, "Hah, fat chance! I'm the master of the mind, I even know what you're thinking right now."

"That's impossible, no one can guess what I'm thinking!" said Mabel

The cartoon boyz from Mabel's favorite movie came to life.

Xyler said, "Whoa, where are we, bro?"

"We must be in heaven, 'cause I just saw an angel!" said Craz, pointing to Mabel.

"You're out of your league, kids," said Bill. "Turn around now before you see something you might regret. Later, suckers!"

Bill crashed his way into the dream Mystery Shack.

Mabel let the cartoon boys carry her in an arm throne. Soos offered Dipper an arm throne too, but he turned it down.

***

Inside, they found endless doors. They found memories of Stan in the Columbian prison, selling vacuum cleaners, and going on a bad date with Lazy Susan. Dipper got side-tracked checking out Stan's memories of him.

Soos found a door leading to memories of the secret levels of the Shack; he quickly shut it before the others could see, lying that it was "Boring."

Mabel found a disturbing secret memory of Stan making a face with his tummy and feeding it crackers.

"Hah, we've been searching forever! What if the triangle guy finds the memory before we do?" asked Soos.

"If we wanna find Stan's memory, we gotta think like Stan. He's always hiding stuff, right?" asked Mabel.

Soos suggested looking under the gift shop rug, a place he had seen Stan hide his arrest warrants.

"Soos, that's it! Look!" said Mabel.

Mabel pointed to a rug. Everyone walked over to it, but Soos let himself fall behind and be "distracted" by another memory, so Bill could step in to impersonate him. Larry in Soos hoped that Bill would notice this and give him credit for being a mole. (Bill was too excited to pay attention and thought Soos was just being Soos).

Mabel flipped the rug and found a door. Everyone gasped. Mabel opened the door and found the memory of Stan inputting the code to the safe with the deed. She wanted to destroy the memory with an axe.

"Wait! Maybe I should do it! My big fat arms are great at destroying stuff!" said Bill as Soos.

"Oh, okay," said Mabel.

Bill as Soos lifted the memory with his telekinetic power.

Then the other imposter Soos (Larry) came back, saying he had seen a memory of Stan roller skating and wearing short-shorts. He pretended to be surprised to see his double.

Bill morphed back to his normal shape.

"Boy, you kids sure are gullible! I knew you'd lead me straight to the code! It's funny how dumb you are," said Bill. "The combination to Stan's safe. Boy, that was even easier then I thought!"

Mabel attempted a comeback, "Oh, yeah? Well, you're a-a stink face!"

She realized how lame it sounded even as she said it, and she snapped at Xyler when he praised it.

Bill said, "Later, suckers!" and flew away.

"Come on! We've gotta save Stan!" said Mabel.

"What's the point?" asked Dipper. He walked down some stairs to them.

"Why should I save him, huh? I work for Stan day and night and all he does in return is say he wants to get rid of me," said Dipper.

"Dipper, I'm sure that's not true," said Mabel.

"I saw it with my one eyes in one of his memories, Mabel!" said Dipper. "He always picked on me and now I know why. Stan hates me!"

Everyone gasped.

"Dipper, it doesn't matter what you saw. If we don't stop Bill, we'll lose the shack!" said Mabel.

Dipper held firm, so Mabel, Soos, Xyler, and Craz went on alone.

"Dipper, you're a cool dude, but.. this isn't cool, dude," said Soos. If Dipper stayed with them he wouldn't learn more dangerous secrets.

They followed Bill and found him communicating the safe combination back to the mind of Gideon. Mabel produced her Nyarf gun and shot the memory out of Bill's hands. It fell into Stan's memory of the Bottomless Pit, lost forever. Gideon called off the deal.

***

Bill was on the brink of achieving his goal. Once his part of the deal was fulfilled, nothing could stop him from getting Journal 2.

But then, that crazy girl! That was the master memory. The combination would be erased from Stan's mind, no matter how many other memories of it had existed. His hopes were destroyed. He was headed for Robot Tartarus once the Time Baby found out. Bill shattered his dream image and morphed to red.

"YOU! You can't even imagine what you just cost me! Do you have any idea what I'm like WHEN I'M MAD?" asked Bill.

Bills Thai numeral boot numbers flashed in his eyes as he gathered power. Flames from his hand encircled his enemies and they were lifted into a starry sky on a huge stone copy of Stan's head. Bill became huge and towered over them.

"So I guess he gets very mad when he gets mad," said Soos.

"EAT NIGHTMARES!" said Bill.

In a few seconds he gave Soos a nightmare of a British dog man, removed Mabel's cuteness, and destroyed Xyler and Craz.

"And now to finish you all once in for all!" said Bill. Since he was doomed, he might as well take as much of the Ring with him as he could and totally ruin the Time Baby's plans.

Dipper flew in. "Hey Bill!"

"WHAT?!" said Bill.

"Nice bow tie!" said Dipper. He made a hole in the tie with his laser face. "Guys! I just learned that you can conjure whatever you can conceive in Grunkle Stan's mindscape! "

"Huh?" asked Mabel.

Dipper said, "Just think of cool fighting stuff and it will happen. Like this!" He blasted away the British dog man with his lasers.

Bill was shocked. This was the real fighting Domiclese, laser face and all. Hero of the Great Robot War.

By the time he organized his thoughts, all the others were fighting: Mabel with kitten fists, and Soos with a stomach beam stare (Larry knew Bill hadn't realized he was an ally and that he would have to fight for his life now and reconcile with Bill later).

Bill said, "Enough games!" and shot a laser from his eye.

Mabel said, "Hamster ball shields activate!"

Balls of force formed around Mabel, Dipper, and Soos. These were from Callisto's power.

"AH! Oh my eye! AAH!" said Bill as his laser attack reflected back at him.

"Rise, Xyler! Rise, Craz!" said Mabel.

Xyler and Craz appeared behind her with musical instruments. They started to play synthesized music.

"No! Synthesized music! It hurts!" said Bill.

"And now to imagine your worst nightmare! A portal out of Stan's mind!" said Dipper.

"No, no, no! Enough!" Bill made everything around them white, and he became yellow again.

"Domiclese... Callisto... Helen of Troy... the Trojan Horse," thought Bill. Maybe all was not lost after all.

"You know, I've been impressed with you guys. You are more clever than you look. Especially the fat one," said Bill. There was something different about the handyman, he was just noticing.

"He's talking about you!" whispered Soos to Mabel, in a lame attempt to distract attention from himself.

Bill said, "So I'm gonna let you kids off the hook. You might come in handy later. But know this: A darkness approaches. A day will come in the future when everything you care about will change! Until then I'll be watching you! I'LL BE WATCHING YOU..."

It was all true. He showed them their symbols on his Ring as proof. But now it was time to pull out of the dream.

Dipper said, "He's gone! we did it!"

They all started to fade out.

"Stan must be waking up," said Dipper.

"Will I ever see you again?" Mabel asked Xyler and Craz.

"In your dreams," said Craz.

"Good one, bro, good one," said Xyler.

***

They all woke up with a yell.

"We did it!" said Mabel.

"What? Did what? What are you all doing here? And why was I dreaming of two brightly colored and radical young men?" asked Stan.

Dipper said, "Grunkle Stan! You're okay!" and grabbed him around the neck.

"What is this, a hug?" asked Stan.

Dipper said, "Nope! It's a choke hold."

"Not bad, kid. Not bad," said Stan.

"I'm just glad Gideon didn't get into the safe. I really love this old shack," said Mabel.

"Group hug! No? I never know the right time!" said Soos.

The shack vibrated.

"Hey, do you guys feel..." said Dipper.

There was an explosion and the wall behind the sofa broke open,

"Oh, I'm sorry, Pines family. Did I wake you?" asked Gideon.

"But.. we defeated Bill!" said Dipper.

"Bill failed me! So I switched to plan B. Dynamite," said Gideon.

"What? Bill, who? What are you guys talking about?" asked Stan. Did all of them know about Bill now? He had to cover for himself.

Gideon said, "Spoiler alert, Stanford! I've got the deed! The Mystery Shack belongs to me! So get out of my property!"

Gideon used a walkie-talkie, "Daddy? Bring it around the front."

"Don't worry, guys! It's just part of the dream! We're gonna wake up any second now! Right? Right?" asked Dipper.

Bud Gleeful smashed the Mystery Shack's sign with a wrecking ball, as the Pines and Soos shouted in surprise.

"Someone pinch me, dude," said Soos.

***

Bill watched, cloaked from view. "I'm going to fix this, and the little man who reneged on his deal is going to pay. Big time. That's a pun."

Bill laughed insanely.


	26. Gideon's Fall

"I think I get it," said Bill to Soos in a dream, "You're one of my wax figures and you mind-swapped with Soos?"

"Yes, Mr. Cipher," said Soos. "I'm Wax Larry King. Sorry I had to fight you to keep my cover last night."

"No problemo," said Bill. "Glad I didn't destroy you: you'll come in handy. Get away from the others this morning when you can and meet me at my summoning site."

"I'll tell them I'm looking for odd jobs, since the Mystery Shack has been closed down," said Soos.

"See you soon," said Bill. "Buy gold. Bye!"

Soos woke up then, as Dipper screamed and woke up beside him.

"I just had a horrible dream that Gideon stole the deed to the Mystery Shack, and kicked us out, and we all had to move in with Soos' grandma," Dipper said.

"That was no dream, dude," said Soos.

Dipper screamed again.

"Shh. Por Favor," said Abuelita.

She wasn't the real grandmother of Soos, it seemed, just a kindly old lady who had been hypnotized into thinking she was. That was fine with Larry, since it helped cover any mistakes he might make.

The group watched the news together.

Reporter Shandra Jimenez said, "In a movement that has all of Gravity Falls buzzing, child psychic Gideon Gleeful has taken surprise ownership of the Mystery Shack, previously belonging to area shyster, Stanford Pines."

The image of Stan in a devil costume with flames behind him appeared on the screen.

"That picture's taken out of context," said Stan. (It was one of his Summerween scare tricks, using an advanced holographic projector for the flames).

"Now that you have the shack, what exactly are you planning to do with it?" Shandra asked Gideon.

Gideon said, "I have a big announcement to make today, and I'd like to cordially invite all the good people of Gravity Falls to join me. Free admission to anyone who wears their Gideon pins! It's my face!"

"I just can't believe Gideon beat us," said Dipper. "Normally I'm able to save the day. This is all my fault."

Mabel said, "Don't worry, Dipper. Looks like Mabel's going to have to be the hero of the family now. I'll defeat Gideon with my grappling hook!"

Dipper said, "Mabel, no offense but that grappling hook has literally never helped us once."

"Oh yeah? Jelly grab!"

Mabel shot her grappling hook at a jar of jelly, breaking it and splattering jelly on the wall.

"I vacuum the walls now," said Abuelita.

Larry wondered if an obsession with vacuuming was common among people under long-term mind control. Probably so.

***

They all attended the "Grand Closing" of the Mystery Shack in disguise, so they wouldn't get thrown out by Gideon's guards.

Before the show started, Soos slipped away for a few minutes to meet with Bill.

"I see you're wearing a 'Not Soos' tag on your hat," said Bill. "Very appropriate, since you're really not."

"Ironic, isn't it?" said Larry in Soos. "What do you need me to do? I need to get back to the others pretty pronto."

"It won't take long," said Bill. "I'm going to clone you and send the clone back in time with that time machine you captured."

"It's not a regular Time Baby model," said Soos. "No hourglass infinity symbol logo."

"All the better," said Bill. "I don't need the Time Baby to know about this mission in detail, like how we didn't know where the portal codes were until the last minute."

"So this is a covert mission?" asked Soos,

"Not completely. I put in a request for a punishment outcome for a guy who reneged on a deal," said Bill. "We've got a Time Agent on the future end, a trainee, just to observe and send pictures when we've got an outcome for Gideon we want. We don't want him dead, though: we still need him for the ceremony."

"Won't time, like, fight the changes if we use info from the future?" said Soos.

"Not if we do it right," said Bill. "The agent just observes and reports when the outcome is like we want. If it isn't, we get no report, and we adjust the plan. When it's good, I send back the pictures as images I can show Gideon really fast. That will lock in the outcome for him."

"Cool, I get it," said Soos. "...No, I don't."

"Never mind," said Bill. "Just give me a hair sample and go back to the others."

***

The cloned Soos (with the mind of Wax Larry King and with minor cosmetic alternations) went back in time as Deuce. It was a significant name, which could mean "two" or "the devil."

He applied for work at the Tent O' Telepathy as a handyman.

"We gotta hire him, Daddy," said Li'l Gideon. "It'll be one more thing that Stan's got that we've got, too."

"If you say so, precious," said Bud Gleeful.

Deuce made himself useful. He was aware that they sometimes used Old Man McGucket for odd jobs. Once he was a gondolier for a date between Mabel and Gideon. At other times he was a shill for Bud's used car lot. He would throw money around (money they gave him) and shout, "I want that car!", which would start a bidding war for the worthless vehicle.

One day Deuce suggested, "Ya know dudes, McGucket's pretty good a buildin' robots. He once built an eighty-ton robot that looked a lot like himself, to follow a dude around saying 'Shame, shame.' Ya oughta maybe get him to build a robot of you."

"I don't know," said Gideon. "Where would I hide a giant robot of me?"

"Like, in plain sight," said Deuce. "Say you put up a big amusement park with the giant robot in the middle, like a statue of you. Then one day you rev it up and..."

"Take over!" said Gideon. "Ah like it. That's better than my idea of puttin' the Tent up in place of the Mystery Shack, once I steal the deed. And all the construction would cover the diggin' for... never mind what for."

"Yep, McGucket could do that for ya, no problem," said Deuce.

"Ah want to test his skills before Ah hire him," said Gideon. "Is the shame bot still around?"

"Nope, but he might have a robot pterodactyl," said Deuce.

"Get hold of him for me," said Gideon. "Ah want him to test his dinosaur against the Pines family."

***

McGucket agreed; he refurbished the killer pterodactyl bot for hire, and built a baby bot for it as well. He had it do some damage in town like ripping the roof off the police car of Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland, and carry off some cattle, to lay a false trail.

Duece told McGucket of an opportunity to carry off Waddles when the pig would be left outside by Stan, wearing a red sweater that could be unraveled to create a trail. The Pines would be led into the area where the sap-covered dinosaurs were in time stasis. The old pterodactyl was torn out of the sap to make the attack seem natural.

McGucket was waiting at the entrance to the Jurassic Sap Hole to follow them in and make trouble along the way. He pretended to be swallowed by the baby bot, and got out easily later with his remote control.

Deuce was fairly sure all would turn out well for Waddles and the Pines, because the timing of the attack was based on knowledge from the future. Soos was forewarned of the attack, and he went along to make sure they were all right. He was told of a weakness in the vision of the baby pterodactyl that would let them leave the nest safely

The net result was that Stan appeared as a hero in the eyes of his grand-niece, and Gideon was convinced McGucket's robots would do the job, even though everyone escaped alive this time.

***

The trainee agent the Time Baby sent, Blendin Blandin, was there in the Jurassic Sap Pit to take some pictures of the attack in the pit to make sure it went well. He was hidden by his camouflage suit, and the pattern was stored in the suit in case it was ever needed again. After that, Blandin went off to his next watch point. He was wearing his red-labeled trainee tape-measure time-machine so that other agents in the vicinity would be warned to cover for his mistakes.

McGucket began assembling the materials for his next big project, the Gideon-bot.

***

Because of the time changes, when the Pines and Soos attended the Grand Closing in disguise, they saw Gideon unveil his new plans for Gideonland, with a giant statue of himself as a prominent feature. (Before the change, it was simply the Tent O' Telepathy in the new location, as the old TV ad has promised).

Everyone was praising Gideon for his recent accurate psychic readings, like the horrifying secret birthmark on Toby Determined, and the secret ingredient in Lazy Susan's coffee omelets.

The Pines tried to protest and regain ownership of the Shack.

Stan said, "Listen up, people. Gideon's a fraud! This kid broke in and stole my property!"

"Arrest him, officers!" said Mabel,

"Yeah!" said Dipper.

Gideon said, "Such accusations! Mr. Pines, I recall you gave the property to me. Look, here's the deed right here!

"Well that's all the proof I need to see," said the Sheriff.

"I love you, Li'l Gideon! Sing them funny songs!" said the Deputy.

The Pines were thrown out by Gideon's guards, after Gideon slapped a pin on Stan.

Gideon said, "Thanks for visiting Gideonland, friends! Don't come back, Ah don't care for y'all."

***

Mabel and Dipper went to the gnomes for help in raiding Gideon and getting the deed back. The gnomes were overcome by Gideon's whistle and the twins were forced off the property empty-handed. They were out of ideas and would have to board the bus for home that evening.

The plan called for Journal 3 to be lost to Gideon as bait for a later attack with the Gideon-bot which would lead to a fall and an explosion, causing everyone to gather round. There were multiple repeats required to get that outcome.

First, the book had to be dropped. The gnomes who struggled with Dipper were commanded to make that happen (by Gompers, who had previously scared them from simply taking Mabel as their queen when they had the opportunity again).

Second, the book had to be dropped cover side down, so that Gideon would take it for Journal 1, long enough to lead to a chase between the Gideon-bot and the bus with Mabel and Dipper. Blandin was on hand to record when Gideon first saw the cover of Journal 3 at the proper time. This image was sent back to show to Gideon during Bill's "Lots of things" images, to lock in that outcome for him.

***

Blandin's next mission was out into the valley, under the old abandoned railroad bridge. The Gideon-bot had to fall here for maximum effect, gathering a large crowd.

Soos had to drive the bus and lead the chase in the proper direction. There had to be a way down from the top of the cliff to the abandoned train tracks: a tunnel was provided for the twins.

Dipper had to be primed to make a super android leap to get into the bot after Mabel was captured; this required that Dipper be given dreams of his leaping training by the Manotaurs, which Bill provided.

The robot fell in the right place, and Blandin got an image of that outcome to be sent back to Gideon to lock it in. There were still tweaks to be made: on the first attempt Dipper and Mabel died from the fall. Mabel was given more dreams of successfully using her grappling hook, so that she would try it even if there didn't seem to be anything to attach it to (there wasn't anything, but Callisto's emergency telekinetic flight would cut in if Mabel made the attempt).

Then there was the problem of Gideon. He was fatally wounded in the fall, and he died in the subsequent explosion. All the evidence of his wrongdoing was destroyed, so the Pine twins were sent to prison for his murder. Blandin observed this and didn't send a message of success.

Someone had to shield Gideon, and there was only one other person with Callisto's latent hamster-ball powers available for the task.

***

Lebam was sleeping happily in her puppy-pile of Sev'ral Timez boys when a strange yellow triangular figure joined her dreams.

"Hi Lebam! I'm Bill Cipher."

"Oh yeah? What do you want, nightmare?" Lebam said. "I'm not afraid of you."

"I'm seeking the downfall of Gideon Gleeful, and I wondered if you would like to help," Bill said.

"Revenge on Gideon: I've dreamed of that before. What did you have in mind for him?" asked Lebam.

"At his moment of triumph, he will lose everything and go to adult prison," said Bill. "That good enough?"

"I'd rather he died," said Lebam.

"Then he wouldn't suffer," said Bill.

"Will he suffer a lot in prison?" asked Lebam.

"Some... but his mind-control powers will protect him from the worst of it," Bill admitted.

"Then no deal... unless... could you make him my personal slave instead? I want to be able to control him the way he controlled me," said Lebam.

"That can be arranged. He has to go to prison first, though," said Bill.

"I want to take away his power to control others, and any other supernatural powers he has," said Lebam.

"We'll break him out of prison, take away his powers, and then he can be your slave for the rest of his life," said Bill. "Is it a deal?"

Lebam hesitated, and thought, "I have a sweet life with the boys right now... but they're getting better and better at taking care of themselves. They have the gig at the convenience store to keep them supplied with food. Soon they might stop needing me and I'll be left alone. But revenge on Gideon... now that would be truly satisfying."

"Deal!" said Lebam.

"Deal," said Bill. He put out his hand and she shook it. Blue flames appeared around their hands.

Lebam woke, wondering if it was just a dream. Then she felt a bolo tie around her neck; it had a blue-green stone.

***

Lebam was hiding in the bushes when the Gideon-bot fell. She had been instructed how to use the pink hamster-ball power, her legacy from being a clone of Callisto. Just before the bot hit the ground there was a pink flash from her power, followed by a huge blue explosion. Lebam successfully shielded Gideon, the room in the robot below him, and herself. Dipper and Mabel descended slowly, avoiding the shock of the explosion. The sudden stop was still enough to stun Gideon inside the bot.

Once the shock wave settled, Lebam pulled Journal 3 from Gideon's coat with telekinesis (using her amulet, though she could have used Callisto's power) and set it on the ground under a piece of scrap metal from the robot, where it could easily be found by Dipper when he landed.

She gave a feral smile to the fallen bot before walking away.

"Soon, very soon, you'll be mine, 'boyfriend'."

***

When Gideon woke, things at first seemed to be going his way.

The Deputy ran up to him, very concerned. "Gideon! Oh, good heavens! What on earth happened here?"

Gideon said, "It was the Pines twins! They tried to attack me and blow up mah statue with dynamite! Arrest 'em!"

"What?" Dipper said, "Officers, he's lying!"

Sheriff_Blubs said, "Sorry kids, but we trust Gideon. And nothing short of a miracle would ever change our- "

Stan came racing up in his El Diablo. "Wait! Wait! Stop everything! I've got somethin' to say!"

Blubs said, "Not this guy again."

"Just wait!" said Stan. "Look! You guys all think Gideon is so perfect and honest. 'Oh! I could never tell a lie! I'm Gideon!'"

Blubs said, "He's more honest than you!"

Durland said, "Yeah! And he's psychic too!"

"How's this for psychic?" said Stan. "Bam! Take a good look!"

The lower floor of the bot below the driver's room was full of televisions looping videos, each showing the people of Gravity Falls.

"Wait a minute, is that ME?" said Lazy Susan.

"The secret ingredient to my coffee omelet is coffee!" said her TV image.

Toby Determined said, "And me!"

"I can verify that that birth mark is indeed disgusting," said the image of the Doctor.

"Hooray!" said Toby.

The crowd moved in and each saw themselves. "That's me! That's me!"

Stan said, "That's right, these pins are hidden cameras! And my hearing aid was picking up the feedback! Who's the fraud now?"

The people threw down their pins, which cracked open to reveal hidden cameras in the eye that wasn't winking.

The crowd turned on Gideon, who giggled nervously.

Durland said, "Gideon, we gave you our trust.."

Manley Dan said, "You LIED to us!"

"Please, I... It's not what it looks like... What are you gonna do with me?" said Gideon.

"Tyler?" asked the Deputy.

"Get 'im.. Get 'im!" said Tyler, wiping away a tear.

Blubs said, "Lil' Gideon, you are under arrest for conspiracy, fraud, and breaking our hearts. Durland? The tiny handcuffs."

Gideon found himself handcuffed and marched toward the back of the police car.

"No!" he said.

"Just one more thing," said Stan.

Stan grabbed Gideon and shook him, causing all the objects in his pockets to fall out: keys, candy, a picture of Mabel, an axe, the deed to the Mystery Shack, and Journal 2. Stan picked up the last two items as one.

"I believe this belong to me," said Stan, showing the deed to the gathered reporters.

Gideon was driven away to jail, raving about his hair, how they needed him, and how he would be back.

Blandin captured an image of the prison for Bill to show, signalling a successful outcome.

***

Bill was satisfied. He thought, "I got Deuce to create a secret level in the Gideon-bot, completely unknown to the boy idiot. Then I led Stan to open it in front of everyone. It was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. Getting an enemy to accept a gift that caters to their vanity, with a concealed compartment which allows their weakest point to be attacked. So clever of me. And it was all inspired by that creation of Odysseus to defeat the New Robot Order, the Trojan Horse."


	27. We Have Them All

It took a week to get the Mystery Shack completely back in business after the damage Gideon did. But people started coming to the gift shop right away, now that Stan was a local hero. They had enough money to keep going. Stan received a new safe as an anonymous donation, tagged only with the letters "BC."

Gideon used his mental powers that week to create a small gang for himself in prison. He even made an illegal show from there, called "Li'l Gideon's Big House."

***

The night after the grand re-opening, Dipper and Mabel told Gruncle Stan about Journal 3. He laughed about it and borrowed it, saying it would give him ideas for the Mystery Shack.

Later that night, he took the book down to his secret basement rooms. He put together their Book 3, Gideon's Book 2, and his own Book 1, open to the portal diagram pages.

"After all these years," Stan said. "Finally, we have them all."

With the codes entered, the machine began to hum and light up.

"It's working!" Stan said.

He ran into the other room and threw an enormous lever. The portal glowed.

"Here we go!" he said.

Then he yawned, his head nodded, and he fell asleep on his feet.

An evil laugh was heard in the room, though nobody was visible except for a triangular shadow.

"Sorry about that, Sam," said the voice. "Heavy is the head that wears the fez."

***

"Did you hear that noise?" Dipper asked Mabel.

Something in the atmosphere of the place had made them restless tonight. They had dressed and gone outside to look around.

"I heard a sort of rustle in the bushes. Do you think Gruncle Stan is sleepwalking again?" asked Mabel.

"No, I hear more of a deep humming sound. It seems like it's coming from underground," said Dipper. "Listen."

They both put their ears to the ground, listening hard. Because of this they were unprepared when hooded figures emerged from the bushes, threw sacks over their heads, and carried them away.

***

Gideon Gleeful sat in his prison cell, far from gleeful. Everything possible had gone wrong, and it was all the fault of the Pine twins and his old enemy, Stan. He was wearing his hairnet, the only way he could keep his hair perfect in this place.

Flames lit up the cell, rippling around a black triangle with single white eye, as the rest of everything became gray. The triangle shifted to yellow, becoming a floating yellow being with a black top hat.

"Hi Gideon, Bill's back," said Bill Cipher.

"What are you doing here?" asked Gideon.

"Fulfilling our deal, kid," said Cipher. "Stanford Pines just fell asleep, with nobody on guard. I got the combination for Stan's safe. Here it is: 13-44-6-18."

"What? That's no use to me. The safe doesn't exist anymore. I blew it up, and got the deed myself. Not that it did me any good," said Gideon.

"I bought him a new safe and got the combination from that. You didn't specify which safe, just 'Stan's safe'," said Cipher. "Now that I've done it, you owe me."

"That's not fair," said Gideon. "And how can I do you a favor, anyway? I'm in prison," said Gideon.

"Oh, jail is the least of your worries, kid," said Cipher. "My favor is: let me into your mind."

"No, I don't wanna," said Gideon.

"I always hold people to the letter of their deals," said Cipher. "I'm like my brother Lou that way."

"Lou Cipher," said Gideon. "Lucifer? Oh no!"

"Just messing with you," said Bill. "You deserve it."

The dream projector turned up to full power and took control of Gideon.

"Now that I have your physical body, we have places to go and things to do," said Cipher through Gideon

He raised a hand crackling with electricity and blasted a hole in the cell wall. He floated through it with an evil laugh.

***

The sacks were removed from Dipper and Mabel's heads. They found themselves surrounded by hooded figures wearing blank fezzes on top of their hoods, in a large room with a zigzag patterned floor. Dipper recognized it.

"We're in The Club, where I met Gideon to tell him you were breaking up with him," he whispered to Mabel.

"Silence," said a deep-voiced hooded figure at the front of the room, with a large barn owl perched on his shoulder. "The meeting of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel, Blindeye Branch, will come to order. First order of business: the disposal of those who have aided our enemy."

***

Gideon came down to earth in the woods near the Mystery Shack. Bill Cipher let go of his control, leaving his host with a wrenching sensation.

"Hey, that smarted," said Gideon.

"Get used to it, All-Seeing Pentagram," said Bill.

"What do you want with me? What are we doing here?" Gideon demanded.

"The portal is about to be opened, and I need my Ring Symbols present for my masters," said Bill.

"What symbols? What masters?" asked Gideon.

"There's Stitched Heart, Ice, All-Seeing Pentagram, and Llama," said Bill. "Shooting Star and Pine Tree are in a bit of trouble: Question Mark had gone to help them. He'll bring back Six-Fingers, also. That leaves Fez Symbol, already below, and Glasses, who may be permanently lost. We'll see if we can get him back when the portal's fully operational."

"Where are the others? And who are they?" asked Gideon.

"Here's one: the kid you killed a year ago and made into a zombie: Stitched Heart."

Robbie stepped out of the woods and nodded at Bill, "Yo."

"You... I created you to attack Stanford Pines but you never followed my orders," said Gideon, shrinking back in fear.

"Zombies don't follow orders, dweeb," said Robbie. "I came because Bill promised Wendy would be here."

"And here she is: Ice," said Bill.

Wendy stepped out of the woods also. She flinched when she saw Robbie, "I'm not here for you, Robbie. I only came because Bill promised it would help my family."

"Oh, it will," said Bill. "And here's one more."

A brown-haired girl with braces stepped out of the woods. She was wearing a light brown sweater with a llama on it. The llama faced left, like the one on Cipher's wheel. Around her neck was a bolo-tie amulet like the one Gideon used to wear.

"Mabel!" said Gideon.

"Think again," said the girl with a smirk. "Remember me? Mabel's mirror doppelganger you brought to life as a backup girlfriend, until I escaped your slimy clutches?"

"Lebam," said Gideon.

"Call me 'Mistress'," Lebam said. "And get on your knees."

Her amulet glowed and Gideon found himself compelled to obey. "Yes, Mistress."

Bill said, "Wait a moment, Lebam. He needs to be transferred into a clone body to remove the mental powers he picked up from his amulet. It has obedience nanobots keyed to you, so you won't have to use mind-control from your amulet to make him obey. You can if you want, but you wished for all the power he had over you."

"Why are you doing this to me?" Gideon moaned.

"You backed out on a deal," said Bill. "I don't forgive that."

"I want revenge," said Lebam. "I own you for the rest of your life, like you tried to own me."

"The little dork might like that," said Robbie.

"I'm not going to do that sort of thing," said Lebam. "I'm not that sort of mistress. This is about humiliation."

A clone of Gideon was made, Gideon's mind was transferred into it, and the original body was destroyed. Gideon could feel no trace of the power over others he was used to having for so long.

"Now, take off that hair net and mess up your hair," commanded Lebam.

"Not my hair!" said Gideon, but he was forced to obey. His perfect pompador was frizzed out like a mop.

"Now lick my shoes," said Lebam.

Gideon was forced to obey, but before he could finish Bill interrupted.

"Okay, fun time's over. Time to go downstairs for the portal ceremony," said Bill.

"What?" said Lebam. "You didn't say anything about that."

"I didn't? My bad," said Bill.

"What happened to Gideon being my slave for the rest of his life?" asked Lebam.

"Well, you see, it's not going to be his life any more," said Bill. "And that's true for all of the rest of you."

"What! No!" the others shouted. They tried to run, but Bill's force fields grabbed and lifted them.

"There are twelve Titans, but two don't require hosts," said Bill. "That's why I have ten Symbols on my Ring. When Soos comes back with the other three (and hopefully we find the missing Glasses) we will finally have them all."


	28. The Teen Titans

The two pairs of humans were lifted by Bill's power and taken within the Mystery Shack gift shop.

"You can do the honors, Lebam," said Bill. "There are still control nanobots in you, just not keyed to Gideon anymore."

Lebam was compelled to walk to the vending machine near the "Employee's Only" entrance and to type in a series of buttons. A panel swung open.

"What is this?" she asked, discovering she was still in control of her voice.

"This is the entrance to the secret levels, which were built by me and other robots from another dimension centuries ago," said Bill.

She and Gideon walked, while Wendy and Robbie were lifted, down a small flight of stairs.

At the bottom was an elevator, and here was a symbolic pad.

"What kind of symbols are these?" Lebam asked, trying to keep panic out of her voice.

"Alien scientific symbols," said Bill. "You may know them from alchemy, the human attempt to imitate our science, with a little knowledge mixed with a lot of superstition. A cargo cult, basically."

"What are you going to do with us?" Wendy asked in a tight voice.

"You won't be physically harmed," said Bill. "You'll see."

"Ah don't like this," said Gideon.

"None of us do, dweeb," said Robbie.

They went down in the elevator to the third below-ground floor. There were banks of what looked like old computers, and a desk where the books were arranged in a triangle.

"The three Journals!" said Gideon. "The key to ultimate power."

"Yes indeedy," said Bill. "Power for the Titans, but you lucky people get to participate."

Stanford Pines was sleeping on his feet in front of a glowing portal that looked like an inverted triangle with a circle within it.

"Okay Sam, you can wake up now," said Bill.

"Huh? What?" said Sam (aka Stan) groggily, as he roused.

"Places, everyone," said Bill.

A glowing ring appeared on the floor, with symbols in every space around Bill. Stan was already on the Fez Symbol. Wendy, Robbie, Lebam, and Gideon were placed in the Ice, Stitched Heart, Llama, and All-Seeing Pentagram positions respectively. All were held motionless except for the ability to speak.

"Now to meet my Maker," said Bill, sending a signal to the computers.

The portals glowed again and a gigantic baby with red eyes and a glowing blue hourglass on his forehead floated into the room, taking his place in the center of the circle.

The humans present wanted to laugh, but realized they had better not.

"All is nearly ready, your Highness," said Bill, bowing to the the figure. "Here are the first ones for the ceremony."

"The others are coming?" asked the Time Baby.

"Very soon, your Highness," said Bill.

"Then while we wait I will satisfy your curiosity, chosen humans," said the Time Baby. "I am Chronos, leader of the robotic race called the Titans."

"You're a baby, so where are the teens?" asked Robbie sarcastically.

"You ask the question in jest, but it's truer than you know," said Chronos. "You will be one of them."

There was a collective gasp from the group.

"When we ruled before, we made the mistake of keeping our vulnerable robot bodies in this dimension," said Chronos. "Humans rebelled against us and many of us were destroyed. A rival group of my childern, the Olympians, were also almost completely wiped out. Fortunately there are backups of our minds in our home dimension. Now we have a new strategy. We will keep our true bodies safe there, and project our personalities onto host humans here through the portal."

"So we're supposed to be hosts to aliens?" asked Stan. "What will that do to us?"

"It is helpful for the hosts bodies to have true human minds, to keep them functioning properly. You will be fully alive, able to experience all your senses," said Chronos. "But you will be passengers in your own bodies, each with a god in control of your physical actions."

"What do the gods want to do... in us?" asked Lebam.

"They are eager to experience all they can of human life and pleasure," said Chronos. "Your lives will be pleasurable indeed, once we take back the planet."

"Sounds like when Bill Cipher called me a living ventriloquist dummy, he was tellin' the truth," said Gideon.

"That was my little joke, your Majesty," said Bill. "I always tell the literal truth, sort of."

"Hey, I was promised I'd get rich when the banks crashed," said Stan.

"You will be rich, as one of the rulers of the planet," said Bill.

"I was promised you would help my family," said Wendy.

"I meant your new family, the Titans," said Bill.

"What a cheater and a liar," said Lebam. "You let me have maybe a minute with Gideon as my slave."

"Liar, monster, fancy dresser," said Bill. "That's me."

"Now for the host assignments. Four pairs of the Titans were married," said Chronos. "Bill was able to find three couples. I too was married, but my wife Rhea will not be joining us; she betrayed me to Zeus long ago."

"C-couples?" asked Wendy.

"You and the Stitched Heart are one," said Chronos. "You will be Oceanus and Tethys, god and goddess of the sea. Your symbols are associated with water: ice and dripping blood, so it is a fitting choice."

"All right!" said Robbie. "We're gonna be together, babe."

"I hate you," said Wendy.

"Next will be the All-Seeing Eye and the Llama," said Chronos. "You will be Hyperion and Theia, god and goddess of light. One of you was associated with fire and the other with reflections, so that is also a fitting choice."

"Ugh! Reality check!" said Lebam. "He's a lot younger than me."

"Thanks to your wish to remove his psychic powers, that is easily fixed," said Bill. "His new body can be aged up; I made sure of that."

"And so can your body, cloned from Callisto, a woman we once aged down," said Chronos.

Chronos pointed to them and both grew rapidly so that they appeared about eighteen. Their clothes became larger with them, so Gideon's prison uniform still covered him.

"This is what you get for askin' for revenge on me, dumplin'," said Gideon. "Now you're stuck with me forever. You're not Mabel, but you'll do."

"I want to be sick," said Lebam. "If my body would just let me."

"You said three couples," Stan said. "Who's the third one?"

"Coeus is the god of the axis of the earth, associated with the inquiring mind. Phoebe is the bright and radiant goddess of prophecy. The most appropriate choices are Domiclese and Callisto, known to you as Dipper and Mabel."

"What?" said Wendy, in almost a scream. "They're brother and sister!"

"The Titans don't care about that," said Bill. "If you read your mythology, you'd know all their marriages were incestuous."

"This is not happening," said Lebam. "This is a nightmare."

"One of the unpaired ones is Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. That will be McGucket, the journal writer and the one with the longest memories," said Chronos.

"Goddess?" asked Stan.

"Nobody's perfect," said Chronos. "Then there's the god Crius, almost unknown in this day; it is fitting that the Question Mark will be his host. If he can be found, Glasses will be Themis, goddess of law and good council, since he is the good brother. Otherwise she will have to wait until we find another host."

"What about me?" asked Stan. "Who do I get?"

"You will be Iapetus the Piercer, wielder of the spear of mortality, the god of death," said Chronos.

"Oh goodie," said Stan sarcastically.

"This is so, so not good," said Lebam. "We're doomed, but I hope Dipper and Mabel get away."

***

Meanwhile, Dipper and Mabel were prisoners of the secret society faction called the Blindeye Branch of the Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel.

"Dipper and Mabel," said the group leader. "You have allied yourselves with Stan Pines, the follower of the demon Bill Cipher. What do you have to say in your own defense before we pass sentence on you?"

"Grunkle Stan is a good man," said Mabel. "Well, he has a good heart deep down, anyway."

"He doesn't follow demons," said Dipper. "That's crazy talk. Cipher went into his mind to steal his safe combination."

"You lie," said one of the hooded secret society members. "That's what we can expect from robot kids. They were put here by the demon. Why shouldn't we just destroy them?"

"Destroy them! Destroy them!" chanted the others.

"We're not robots!" said Mabel. "We're flesh and blood like you. We can prove that: I'll scratch Dipper and prove he bleeds."

"Mabel, why scratch me and not yourself?" Dipper asked.

"Androids have flesh and blood," said the leader.

"Killing us would be murder. Our parents will come looking for us," said Mabel.

"Bring forth Smipper and Smabble," said the leader, pointing his gloved right hand.

Two kids who looked like younger versions of Dipper and Mabel were brought out from a side room.

"This is kind of scary, Pop-Pop," said Smabble to the man holding her hand. "Can we go home now?"

"Behold your replacement clones," said the leader. "Your parents deserve real kids instead of android fakes. Once we age these young'ens up a mite they'll take your place."

"Wait," said Dipper to the leader. "You used old-fashioned words: 'young'en' and 'mite'. Your voice is different, but I know you have a potion to change that."

Dipper ran forward and pulled the leader's hood down. "You're Old Man McGucket!"

"Oh, banjo polish," said McGucket in his deep voice.

The crowd of followers muttered. One said, "We've been following a crazy old koot. Let's go."

"Wait, you've got to believe me!" said McGucket. "They really are androids! The danger of Bill is real! He lied to me. Darkness is coming!"

"Come on, Smipper and Smabble," said the man who brought them in. "Pop-Pop will take care of you from now on."

"But what about Duane the Enforcer, the sacred barn owl?" said one of the followers. "He's real, ain't he? We've been worshiping him."

Dipper pulled the white feathery barn-owl disguise off of the owl on McGucket's shoulder, revealing a brown owl underneath.

"It's the Maraca owl," said Mabel. "I'd know those feathers anywhere."

"And it's a robot," said Dipper, giving it a tap on the side and getting a metallic thunk. It fell to the floor. "I guess it's a turned-off robot right now."

"Oh fiddlesticks," said McGucket.

The others filed out of the Club, dropping their hoods and revealing original members Ernie Wyler, "Uncle" Phil Andry, Barney "Big Mouth" Jackson, and Wally Beavis. There were also new members: Tyler the cute biker, "Manly Dan" Corduroy, Deputy Durland, and Lazy Susan.

"Hey, I didn't know we let women in the Lodge," said Durland.

"You let in anyone in a hood," said Susan. "Anyway, I'm quittin'. Tryin' to spy on Stan Pines ain't worth it: he won't return my calls."

When they all had left, Dipper said to Mabel, "Let's go."

"Not so fast," said McGucket. He grabbed them each around the neck with one arm. His right glove fell off and Dipper could see the stub of a sixth finger on his right hand.

"You used to have six fingers," said Dipper. "You wrote the Journals."

"That's right," said McGucket. "So you know that I know what I'm talkin' about. You're androids and you've been helpin' Bill Cipher. What do you know about the Journals?"

"Almost nothing. I found one of them, Journal 3," said Dipper.

"What did you do with it?" asked McGucket.

"We let Grunkle Stan borrow it," said Mabel. "He's going to use it to get ideas for the Mystery Shack."

"You WHAT?" said McGucket. "Mebbe you did it without knowin' it, but you're still guilty of aidin' and abettin' an alien world conqueror. I may not have followers anymore, but this body's strong: I'll kill you with my own hands."

His grip tightened around their necks, starting to cut off their air.

Soos ran into the room, pointing a high-tech wrist cannon at McGucket.

"Like, drop those kids or I'll shoot," said Soos.

"No siree," said McGucket. "I can kill them afore you kill me."

He choked harder and Dipper began to see stars.

Soos blasted McGucket between the eyes, and he dropped the twins; he fell to the floor dead. Mabel and Dipper gasped for breath.

"I wish I hadn't had to do that," said Soos. "But he was going to kill you, dudes. The rest of the secret society might change their minds and come back for you. Come with me if you want to, like, not die."


	29. Circe's Captive

Mabel and Dipper got into Soos' truck and they headed back to the Mystery Shack.

"Something strange is goin on back at the Shack, dudes," Soos told them. "We gotta go check it out. There are secret floors below ground. I know how to get in... I think."

"Secret floors?" asked Dipper. "Why didn't you tell us before?"

"Sorry, guys. Your Grunkle Stan wanted them kept secret," said Soos. "But now it's an emergency. He may be in trouble down there."

As they got out of the truck, a goat charged out of the shadows. A tranquilizer dart attached to its longer horn (the left one) was butted into Soos.

"Goats... are nature's greatest warriors... after llamas," said Soos as he collapsed.

"Soos!" said Mabel. "What happened?"

"He's not really Soos," said a small voice that seemed to come from the goat. "I am."

"Gompers? You're Soos?" asked Mabel.

"No. I'm the rat riding on the goat's back," said Soos the rat. "And this goat is Amalthea, not Gompers. I mirror-cloned Gompers a long time ago so I could have a goat loyal to me, not Bill Cipher. The long horn's on the other side, see? This goat helped save you on Pioneer Day, by talking a woodpecker into pecking you out of a crate."

"This is all weird-like. How do we know which is really you?" asked Mabel suspiciously.

"I believe him," said Dipper. "Soos has been acting strangely lately. He was way too cool about killing McGucket. And what he said just now, about goats and llamas..."

"Is just what you said when I was picking out sweater that time," said Mabel. "You used a voice like Wax Larry King."

"Dudes, you totally got it," said the rat. "The guy in my body is Wax Larry King. He used the rat to swap with me, that day we were all getting mixed up on the carpet. It was so fun being a pig. I still like corn more than I used to because of that. But I haven't liked being a rat, much."

"How can we get you back?" asked Dipper. "Grunkle Stan got rid of the carpet."

"There's still a chance. You have to use the ship picture in your bedroom," said Soos. "You'll have to sneak in very quietly and get up there without being seen."

"The ship picture?" asked Dipper. "The one you gave me?"

"It has a mini-portal in it," said Soos. "Now that the big portal is open, you should be able to use it to go back in time. You need to go on a quest for a piece of material like the carpet, to do a mind-swap with."

"How can we find material like that?" asked Dipper.

"You'll be in the time of the ancient Greeks. Gods and children of gods will have things like that," said Soos.

"We just ask them?" said Dipper.

"You'll probably have to make a deal," said Soos. "Just be careful and make sure to get solid promises from the gods not to harm you. They pride themselves in keeping their word literally, but they're devious about it."

"How do we get back?" Mabel asked.

"There's a trigger device on the back of the picture," said Soos. "Take it with you and click it when you have what you need. You and everything you're holding should return to the room just after you left."

"Soos, you seem a whole lot smarter," said Dipper. "What's up with that?"

"Some of my silliness was an act," said Soos. "Plus, the brain in this rat's body is smarter and clearer than my regular one."

"What about Grunkle Stan being in trouble underground?" asked Mabel. "Shouldn't we go down and help him first?"

"That was a trap," said Soos. "You should go down, but only with me after your quest is complete and I'm back to normal. Otherwise you'll be caught and things will get really bad. This is the time of darkness Bill Cipher told us about, when everything you care about will change."

"What does that really mean?" asked Dipper.

"What it sounds like," said Soos. "You'll change, the people you love will change, and how you love them will change. It's ugly. It's going to be up to you to save the world."

"Let's skip the ugly for now," said Mabel. "It's save-the-world time!"

"One more thing before we go," said Dipper. "McGucket called us androids and said we really weren't our parents' kids. Is there any truth in that, do you know?"

"It's true," said Soos.

"What!?" said the twins together.

"You're really two heroes from ancient Greece, Domiclese and his twin sister Callisto. Callisto and her son, Arkas, came to a tragic end because of the old Olympian gods. She and her son were mind-swapped with bears and killed. For revenge, Domiclese got a new android body from a rival set of gods, the Titans. He used it to help overthrow the old gods in the Great Robot Wars."

"Hey, that was a story in my history book!" said Mabel.

"Yes, I put it there to stir up your memories," said Soos. "You might take another look at it before you go through the picture portal."

"So, if we're these ancient Greeks, how did we end up here?" asked Dipper.

"As a reward for overthrowing the Olympians, the leader of the Titans, Cronos the Time Baby, granted the wish of Domiclese for a happier life for himself and his sister. Callisto was taken from an earlier time, before she had her son, and you were both sent forward to now, to grow up again together as children and find new happiness."

"Wait a second..." said Mabel. "I came back, but what happened to my son? He was never born?"

"Arkas was born to a clone of you," said Soos. "Genetically, you're his mother. He was brought forward in time to the days of the Oregon trail. I traced the history of a man with a band-aid on his beard back to that time."

"A man with a band-aid on his beard? Old Man McGucket was my son?" asked Mabel in a small voice.

"Yes, that's him," said Soos.

"I just saw my son die!" said Mabel. She burst into tears.

"Mabel, we can talk about that later," said Dipper. "I still can't quite believe it's real. But we have a mission to save the world."

Mabel sniffed and wiped tears from her face, "All right, but we're going to have a good long talk later. I think you're going to be in huge trouble with me, Dipper. I'll explain once I sort my feelings out."

"I'm in trouble with you?" asked Dipper.

Mabel nodded.

"I'll have to stay behind to keep sticking tranquilizer darts into my body so I don't wake up and spill the beans," said Soos. "I got a bunch of them from the walls of President Trembley's cave."

***

Dipper and Mabel entered the Mystery Shack as quietly as they could, avoiding all the creaking stairs on the way up to their attic bedroom.

"I'm going to change clothes for this mission," said Mabel.

She picked out a black sweater with an sad-looking white owl on it. "I'm in mourning. I'll take my favorite white flower hair pin too, named Molly."

"You have names for all your hairpins?" asked Dipper.

"I have names for everything," said Mabel with a ghost of a smile.

***

Dipper took the history book and put it in his jacket, in the place he used to keep Journal 3. He found the remote control on the back of the picture and stuck that in his jacket, too. He and Mabel stood together on his bed, right in front of the picture. Dipper found the switch on the frame and turned it on.

The picture began to move. The waves swelled and the ship's sails blew in the wind.

"We're going to Narnia!" said Mabel "It would cheer me up a lot if we met that cute Prince Caspian."

They jumped, and they were in the sea. The water was cold, but Mediterranean cold and not Atlantic cold. They landed in the water near the ship, but at first they thought it was going to pass them by.

"Ahoy! Help!" they called up. Finally a rope was thrown to them and sailors hauled them up.

"Who are you?" asked a burly man with gray-tinged black hair. He was speaking ancient Greek, but somehow they found they understood.

"Maybe there's really something to this Domiclese story," Dipper thought.

"Mabel and Dipper Pines, sister and brother," said Mabel. "Who are you?"

"I am Odysseus, captain of the fleet," said the man.

"Fleet? I only see one ship," Dipper.

"The others were lost to the Laestrygonians, a tribe of giant cannibals who threw rocks at our ships," said Odysseus.

"Oh dear," said Mabel.

"What is your story? Are you escaped from a shipwreck?" asked Odysseus.

"Not exactly," said Dipper.

"We are far from home and we cannot put you ashore," said Odysseus. "I'm afraid we will have to treat you as spoils of the sea and make you our slaves. The men will appreciate the young woman; we have been a long time without female companionship."

"No!" said Mabel, wrapping her arms around herself.

"Wait!" said Dipper. "Does this mark mean anything to you?"

He pulled off his hat and moved back his hair to reveal his Big Dipper mark.

A grizzled old sailor came forward. "I have heard tell of this, Captain. This is the mark of Domiclese, the hero who helped overthrow the old Olympian gods."

"He helped bring about the even worse rule of the Titans," said Odysseus with a scowl.

Dipper had read a little of the history book and it was fresh in his mind. "But now you've defeated the Titans at Troy, so men are free. Without my part it wouldn't have happened."

Odysseus nodded. "Very well, Domiclese, you and your sister will be treated as our friends and allies. But we are still lost at sea. It will take a long time before I can return to my home country of Ithaca and help you return to your own land."

"Land ho!" came a cry from aloft.

A beautiful island was in sight in the distance. The sailors lost no time in steering to it, and landing the ship in a cove.

***

Odysseus ordered his men to go ashore and scout for supplies. Mabel and Dipper remained on the boat with him. Hours passed, and nobody returned.

"What is taking them so long?" asked Odysseus.

Dipper took out his history book and started looking things up.

"Oh-oh," Dipper said. "This could be the island of Circe. She's the daughter of Helios. That's the Titan sun god, who is the son of Hyperion. That makes her a demigod, and she may have the power to turn men into pigs."

"This sounds like divine prophecy, Domiclese," said Odysseus. "What should I do?"

"You should go in and confront her so she will put your men back to normal," said Dipper. "But make sure you get a promise from her not to harm you, with no loopholes, before you let her touch you. Demigods keep their promises, but they're tricky."

"Take my flower, Molly, for luck," said Mabel. She took out her hairpin and gave it to him.

"A divine herb, the flower moly," said Odysseus. "Methinks you are more than the mortals you seem. You are incarnations of the gods of Olympus, good ones who were not tyrants to man: Hermes and Athena."

"Whatever," said Mabel. "Just be careful."

After Odysseus left, Dipper said, "With him distracting Circe, we need to sneak into her house and look for something."

"What?" asked Mabel.

"It seems to me that the Greek gods didn't really turn people into animals. They just made them swap minds with them" said Dipper. "Circe may have a mind-swap carpet in there somewhere."

***

They sneaked into the house and soon found a room full of pigs. Dipper tried his idea and spoke to them.

"Did Circe touch you with something to make you change bodies with pigs?" Dipper asked.

"Yes," one pig said. "She has a piece of the Golden Fleece. She said it was a gift from her brother Aeetes."

The pig nodded in the direction of a high shelf, where they found a piece of the golden material.

"Got it," said Dipper. "Now we can go." He was about to activate the control from the picture.

"No!" said Mabel. "It we take the fleece how will these men get back to normal? We have to find where she keeps the pigs with their bodies."

It didn't take much searching to find the room, because of the odor of excrement. Each man found his body and they used the static from the fleece to swap them back.

There was one pig left, and Mabel didn't want to leave a victim behind.

"Where is your body?" she asked the last pig.

"It's locked up in a room upstairs," said the pig. "Circe likes it near her bedroom. She says men with pig minds are better lovers. She taunts me about it, even makes me watch, sometimes, ya know?"

They sneaked quietly upstairs, and found the room. It seemed Odysseus was keeping Circe occupied in her bedroom, so they were able to get in undisturbed after Mabel picked the lock with a hairpin. The man they found there looked familiar.

"It's Grandpa Stanley!" said Mabel.

"It's his body, all righty," said the pig.

They swapped Stanley back, and he continued: "I'm not really Stanley Pines. On the night we turned against Bill Cipher, messed up his portal, and hid the journals with the portal codes, we used the carpet in his room to swap bodies. It was supposed to protect us from Bill getting into our minds."

"Did it work?" Dipper asked.

"It worked pretty well for me, except I wound up here when I jumped in the portal, stuck as the slave of a witch," said Stanley. "The only advantage of not bein' in my own body was that I found out how to hootenanny up some astral projection. I was able to push my mind through a mini-portal I found up in the attic of the Mystery Shack, and keep an eye on you kids, sometimes."

"You said 'hootenanny'," said Mabel. "Who are you really?"

"Didn't I say?" said the man. "I'm really Old Man McGucket."

"My son!" Mabel said, throwing her arms around him.


	30. Training Time

After many explanations, McGucket/Stanley finally started to get it.

"So Fertilia Mecc weren't my real mama," he said. "I never thought Fiddleford Mecc was a good name for me. What's my real name, again?"

"Arkas," said Mabel. "I'm Callisto, but you can call me Mom. And this is your uncle Domiclese."

"And my last name?" asked Arkas.

"We didn't use last names back then," said Dipper. "I guess we should stick with Pines."

"Who was my father, Mom?" asked Arkas.

"I had you as a single mom... I think," said Mabel. "I need to recover more of Callisto's memories to tell you the whole story."

"Shouldn't we be getting back to 2012 to save the world?" asked Dipper

"What's the rush?" asked Mabel. "We'll arrive just after we left."

"Mom's right," said Arkas. "If we're going to fight Bill Cipher and the Titans, it's going to be the battle of our lives. Why not stay here until we're better prepared? I'll help you train."

"I don't want to be caught here by Circe with her Golden Fleece," said Domiclese.

"We'll take a boat to a nearby island," Arkas said. "There are lots of 'em around here."

***

When they were safely away from Aeaea, Circe's island, they prepared to train. Arkas knew a lot about hunting and living off the land, and he was going to be their coach.

"The first thing you need is to recover all your memories of your past life," Arkas told them. "I reckon a lot of your powers are tied up in that."

He helped them practice and focus for days, and finally began to get in touch with their true history. Callisto required extra help to get connected with the life-memories of her clone, who was the real mother of Arkas in this time-line. She was shocked at what she found: years of sorrow living as a bear, longing to know how her son was doing but unable to find out anything. She was also shocked to discover that the true father of Arkas was Zeus, in disguise as the goddess Diana, and that it was Zeus who turned Arkas into a bear and then killed them both.

***

After finding this out, Callisto took Domiclese aside.

"Remember when I said we needed a long talk?" Callisto said. "How you were in huge trouble with me?"

"Yes?" said Domiclese warily.

"You did me wrong," said Callisto. "Really wrong. When you went back and offered me a new life you didn't mention my son at all."

"I wanted to forget all that and start over," said Domiclese. "Arkas was the cause of all your trouble, the result of you being raped under a false identity by Zeus. You were so sad after that."

"How dare you? How dare you assume I wouldn't want my son?" asked Callisto. "I longed to see him for years. We finally got together on our last day alive, died together, and were commemorated in the stars as Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. That was the end of my real life."

"I wanted to go back to when we were happy, not bring in all that grief," said Domiclese.

"Grief is part of life, too," said Callisto. "You cut all that off from me, and a deep part of me must have known it. No wonder I've been so silly, with that side lost."

"I didn't realize..." said Domiclese. "I'm sorry."

"I've had it with you," said Callisto. "I'll train and fight with you to try to save the earth, but there's no brother/sister friendship between us any more."

"Mabel, please," said Domiclese. "Hit me or something, but don't stay mad."

"Who's Mabel? Someone with a fake happy life you made up," said Callisto. "And because of that the world is about to fall to the Titans."

"That's not fair. They would have found a way without us," said Domiclese.

"I thought I liked you, but I don't, Domiclese. I mean Dipper. I mean... Frederic," said Callisto.

From that point it was the only name she would call him, and she only spoke to him when she had to.

***

To escape from their anger and pain, they both threw themselves into training. They learned how to use their built-in powers (laser face and hamster ball), the use of each other's powers when swapped, how to age themselves up and down, robot technology and its weaknesses, and hand-to-hand combat.

Arkas told them many stories of his life and adventures, and as much of the plot of the Titans as he had been able to puzzle out in his years of imprisonment. They got the gist of the secret of the Ring and the hosts.

Domiclese returned to Circe's island from time to time and sparred with the warriors of Odysseus. Sometimes he took the opportunity to fill in his knowledge of Greek mythology.

"Do you know of a goat with a broken horn, named Amalthea?" he asked one sailor.

"That's Zeus' old goat, ain't it?" said the sailor. "He broke off its horn as a child, in play."

"Zeus' goat..." said Domiclese. "Hmm..."

***

"Callisto?"

"Yes?"

"I know you don't want to forgive me, but there's someone else you need to think about forgiving, or not. What are we going to do about Soos?"

"What about Soos?" asked Callisto.

"He's actually the god Zeus in disguise. I figured it out," said Domiclese. "His knowledge of everything. The portal tech that got us here. And he named his goat Amalthea, the famous goat that belonged to Zeus."

"The father of my child?" asked Callisto.

"Yes, and the murderer of you and your child," said Domiclese.

"That's hard. He's done a lot to save us. Without him we would be hosts and slaves of the Titans by now, not preparing to beat them," said Callisto.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" asked Domiclese.

"For now," said Callisto. "After the battle, we'll have a reckoning with him. And... Dipper?"

"Yes?" said Domiclese, happy to hear the nickname again.

"I think things turned out good for Arkas. He's had a long life full of adventures and knowledge, and he's a brilliant scientist now. I couldn't have given him all that, raising him as a single mom in modern times. You messed up, but it turned out all right."

"Then you forgive me?" asked Domiclese.

"I guess I do," said Callisto. "One more thing..."

"Yes?" said Domiclese again.

"If we lose, we'll be forced to be husband and wife," said Callisto. "I'll hate that, but I want you to know: I won't hate you or blame you. I'll blame the Titans. You didn't know what they were really like when you made a deal with them."

"I won't let that happen, Callisto. We'll win," said Domiclese.

"I hope so," said Callisto. "You're not what I'm dreaming for in my future love life."

"What are you dreaming for?" asked Dipper.

"I was happiest with the Nymphs of Diana," said Mabel. "I've decided I don't really like men. My only child was with what I thought was a goddess."

"So... you want to restart the Nymphs of Diana in 2012?" asked Domiclese.

"I'm so over Diana," said Callisto. "Even if it had really been her, we had a really bad break-up when she turned me into a bear. I'm thinking more of being a Nymph of Grenda."

"Grenda?" asked Domiclese. "Really?"

"When she's older, if she wants me. There's no rush, but I have a crush on her. She could be the butch to my femme."

"Whatever you want..." said Domiclese. "As for me..."

"Still interested in Wendy?" asked Callisto.

"I think I may actually have a chance, now that I know I've been older than her," said Domiclese.

"Possible," said Callisto. "She needs to see your mature side, but try not to scare her."

"I'll try," said Domiclese.

***

At last they were ready. They made final preparations, stashed the Golden Fleece, held on to Arkas, and Domiclese pushed the return button.

"Here we go," said Domiclese.


	31. Clash With the Titans

The three family members: Domiclese, Callisto, and Arkas moved quietly down the stairs and out of the Mystery Shack.

They found Soos the rat waiting beside his body, with the semi-conscious Wax Larry King in it.

"Do you have it?" squeaked Soos.

Domiclese produced the Golden Fleece and they swapped Soos back into his body. Domiclese used his laser vision to incinerate the rat before it got away.

"Yo dudes, I feel a bit dizzy," said Soos, trying to sit up but failing.

"We need to give him a few minutes to wake up from the tranquilizers," said Callisto. "We can't have him all woozy in the fight."

"Meanwhile, we need to find Arkas a spare hooded secret society cloak," said Domiclese. "If you wear that and walk like McGucket would, the Time Baby and Bill Cipher will see what they expect to see when we go down there."

"Did ol' Stanley really act like me all the time?" asked Arkas.

"I guess he'd gone crazy and thought he was really you," said Domiclese. "Bill must have dumped all sorts of nightmares into his mind, based on your life. Stanley knew how you talked and threw in old-fashioned words all the time, plus a lot he made up. It was exaggerated compared to the real you."

"It's sad Grandpa Stanley's gone," said Callisto. "I never really got to know him."

"With me, you've got a grandfather and a son in one package," said Arkas. "I guess that makes me my own great-grandpa."

Callisto smiled fondly at him. "Yes. Yes it does."

Domiclese knew where to find a spare secret-society costume in the gift shop that would fit Stanley. It was fake, but it would do at a short glance. That was all they needed.

***

"The gangs all here!" said Bill Cipher as they arrived at the third basement level. "Shooting Star, Pine Tree, Question Mark, and even Six Fingers. Good work, Soos, or should I say Larry King?"

"Very good," said the Time Baby. "You have my permission to use your Ring channels and position them for the hosting ceremony."

"Run!" yelled Wendy.

"It's a trap!" said Lebam.

"Got them, your Majesty," said Bill, reaching out for them with his control channels. "What? Wait! Something's wrong."

As planned, Domiclese and Callisto instantly aged themselves up to gain peak strength. No longer children, they were seventeen-year-old heroes now.

"Pine Twins powers, activate," they yelled together.

Domiclese super-leaped forward and kicked the Time Baby, just as Soos sent a signal to the portal computers. The kick sent Chronos flying into the portal, toward a thick sheet of Antarctic ice, decades in the past. Fast as light, his laser vision got there ahead of Chronos and melted a passage deep in the ice. Chronos plunged into it, and Domiclese melted the ice tunnel back around him, so that it instantly froze rock-solid in the intense cold of the Antarctic winter. This was a recorded outcome for the Time Baby in a book Domiclese had seen, so they knew it would hold him.

"One down and one to go," said Domiclese, turning toward Bill.

"I beg to differ!" said Bill.

His own signal overrode the setting Soos had chosen, turning it back to the dimension of the Titan backup robots, all ready to assume control of their hosts who were in position. In an instant the odds changed in the Titan's favor.

Robbie and Wendy were now Oceanus and Tethys, god and goddess of the sea. Gideon and Lebam were Hyperion and Theia, god and goddess of light. And Grunkle Stan was Iapetus, god of death.

The new Titan couples aimed blasts of water and light at their enemies. Domiclese and Callisto used human-sized hamster balls to shield themselves and Arkas. Soos used the powers of Zeus to duel them with lightening blasts.

Iapetus took a little time to morph his eight-ball-headed cane into the invincible Spear of Mortality: the round ball elongated and became sharp, while the eight symbol turned into the triangular hourglass symbol of Chronos.

They all knew that no force ball could withstand the Spear, so they had to act fast. Callisto moved with Arkas, keeping him shielded as he went for the lever that controlled the portal. Domiclese dueled Bill and kept him off balance with laser blasts so that Bill didn't have time to overcome them with nightmares.

As Arkas began to pull back the portal switch, Iapetus finished his spear and pulled it back for a fatal throw that would pierce through Callisto's force ball, Callisto, and then Arcas. But he seemed to struggle with himself and his throw went wrong; it went high and bounced off the ceiling, striking Arkas with only a glancing blow.

Arkas gathered all his strength and pulled the lever back, closing the portal. Then he fell to the floor.

"Arkas!" cried Domiclese. With a wild look he/she blasted Bill into tiny pieces with his/her laser face, and kept blasting.

"I'm melting..." was the last thing Bill said.

"That's enough, Callisto. We've done it. Time to switch back," said the person in Callisto's body. He pulled out the Golden Fleece and rubbed it on Domiclese, switching the twins back. (It was this swap which had protected them from Bill, who had tried to use the wrong channels to control them. Arkas was protected by not being in McGucket's old body, and Zeus was protected by his own power.)

All around the room, the hosts slumped. With no gods projected into them, they were back to normal. All but one. The shock of divine possession and sudden release was too much for the zombie tech that animated the corpse of Robbie Vale. The illusion that hid his decay dissolved and he fell to the floor, a skeleton with desiccated flesh clinging to his bones.

Wendy screamed.

***

Callisto went to Arkas and cradled him in her arms. She pulled back his hood and cried over him.

"He's dying! That spear... even a touch must be deadly," said Callisto. "Somebody help him!"

Stan ran up. "Let me swap with Stanley. My brother should live, not me. Let me pay for my mistakes, trusting that demon."

Domiclese said, "No." He looked at Soos, "Zeus, we need that body of yours. You're a robot, so it's just a spare for you."

"You know, dude?" said Soos.

"You're his father. You murdered him and his mother before, so you owe us," said Domiclese.

Soos said, "I've paid a price for those old crimes already, by losing the Olympians their rule, but I'll pay this one more thing. I'll miss hangin' out with you, dudes. Come visit me in the old break room sometimes."

Soos let them swap him, and the mind of Arkas was saved in the body of Soos. Zeus withdrew from the dying body of Stanley Pines, back to his robot body in the old "break room."

"My mind feels a mite fuzzy now," said Arkas. "Am I a fuzzy bear, Mom?"

"Soos' body comes with a fuzzy mind. But you're alive, that's what matters, Arkas," said Callisto.

"My Bear-O," she thought. "Even with some of the stuffing knocked out of you I still love you."

***

The former hosts paced around aimlessly in the basement for a while, recovering from the shock of what had happened. Explanations were given to everyone who didn't know the big picture.

Wendy came up to Domiclese. "Robbie was a zombie... It's hard to believe. Thanks for saving me from being the wife of that thing."

"Glad to," said Domiclese.

"Your real name is Domi..." Wendy said.

"Domiclese."

"Domi, you're pretty buff like that... Are you planning to stay that way?"

"That would complicate my life too much. But I'm willing to age up for you when we're alone. If you want to go out with me, that is."

Wendy stared at him. "This is pretty weird. I'm kind of in shock..."

"I'm still the Dipper you know. We can have fun, break rules, all that stuff," said Domiclese. "But I've been seventeen before; I know how to be mature. Do we have a chance?"

"...Yeah, I guess so."

***

Mabel had already aged down. "Grunkle Stan, you were amazing. How did you resist the will of a Titan and throw off his aim?"

Stan said, "I've had my suspicions of Bill for a while, kiddo. I was prepared when I threw the portal switch, just in case."

"How?" asked Mabel.

"When I fell into the Bottomless Pit a second time I got the Truth Teeth out of your box. I painted 'em to look like my real teeth. I have an antidote to them making me tell the truth, but I figured it would give my mind some extra resistance if Bill tried to take me over or anything. It worked."

***

"Well, it's been a lovely evenin', y'all, but Ah've got to be on mah way," said Gideon, heading toward the elevator.

"Stop," said Lebam.

Gideon stopped. "Oh-oh."

"Just what I was hoping," Lebam said with a wicked grin.

Callisto came over to them. "Lebam, you don't have to stay aged up, and neither does Gideon. We know how to change ages, and we can teach you."

"You know, Callisto, I think I like this better," said Lebam. "We're not doubles any more, so it'll be easier to make my own life. And I don't want Gideon younger, either. He won't be the cute little boy who can work his wiles on people."

"I liked being li'l ol' me," said Gideon.

"If you were your old self we'd have to send you back to prison, and you wouldn't have your powers to protect you," said Lebam. "Which would you rather, to go to prison or to be my slave?"

"Prison," said Gideon.

"Then I'm definitely keeping you. Someone has to keep you out of trouble," said Lebam. "The boys and I will do that."

"Are you going to be my peach dumplin', now I'm old enough for you? You're really beautiful at this age."

"Never," said Lebam. "You'll never get that from me, or from anyone else, if I have my way. And I will. Come on, slave."

She led Gideon away, smiling to herself.

***

Dipper aged back down to his twelve-year-old self.

Dipper said to Mabel, "We've saved the world, sis. High five?"

"Awkward sibling hug," said Mabel.

They hugged each other and then did a "Pat pat."

Mabel said, "Do you think we ought to destroy the portal?"

"Eventually, but I think we should use it to have more adventures for the rest of the summer, as long as we stay away from the robot world setting," said Dipper.

There was a shimmer in the air and Blendin Blandin appeared.

"The Time Baby gets loose again," he told them. "You saw a battle with him, so we can't prevent that. But with luck we'll put him on ice again. The Time Corp is working for that possible future now."

"I hope you do," said Dipper. "Let me know if you ever need help with that."

"Me too," said Mabel.  
THE END


End file.
